Political Quotes

“I rise to speak about the highway bill. I want to start by first thanking the chairmen and ranking members of the EPW Committee, the Commerce Committee, and the Banking Committee, all of whom worked to put in place some reforms this bill reflects. There is a component of this bill, though, where work has not been done in a satisfactory manner, and that is actually paying for this bill. The Senator from North Carolina, who is in the chair, has been involved in many discussions about deficit reduction. We have had, ad nauseam, meetings about how to get our spending under control. Last year, after Erskine Bowles, from her State, and Alan Simpson came together with the Bowles-Simpson report, there was a pretty big effort in this body to try to adopt the principles laid out therein. As a matter of fact, 32 Republicans and 32 Democrats sent a letter to the President asking him to embrace those principles. Later on there was another effort by a supercommittee that was put in place. Numbers of people on both sides of the aisle wrote letters asking that this supercommittee do something outstanding for our country and reduce the deficit by $4 trillion, if possible. My point is that there has been a lot of bipartisan effort toward reducing the deficit. Yet the only thing we have done thus far--the only thing that had any meat on it at all was the Budget Control Act, which was passed on August 2. The Budget Control Act was passed in a trade, if you will.…”