Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to thank the Senator from New Hampshire who I think has offered extraordinary leadership on this issue and on the issues regarding our country's huge amount of indebtedness. As does Senator Gregg, I find it hard to believe that we are taking over $500 billion in savings from Medicare, as he just mentioned, to leverage a new entitlement when we know that Medicare itself has a $37 trillion unfunded liability. As he mentioned, we go further by not even dealing with this doc fix which he was just discussing. I look forward to his amendment, I look forward to supporting it, and I thank him for his leadership. I wish to speak today about unfunded liabilities. I was the mayor of a city. I know the Presiding Officer served in the general assembly in the State from where he comes. I was the commissioner of finance for our State where we dealt with all of our financial issues for the State of Tennessee. I know Senator Gregg was a Governor. One of the things that I think bothered all of us who used to serve at the city and State levels was unfunded mandates. It is an incredible thing where Washington will pass a piece of legislation and, by the way, have a major signing ceremony where everybody is patting each other on the back and celebrating that they just passed something, and the part that is left out is that the States across this country are left with a huge unfunded mandate. We have a very good Governor in our State. His name is Phil Bredesen.…”