Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert). We have engaged in a colloquy on his time. I am going to start my 30 minutes. He, of course, is welcome to stick around a little bit if he wants. I am going to just jump off from where he started, or I am going to start from where he left off, and that is to talk about what we are debating on the floor right now, which is the reconciliation bills that we are debating in the House and in the Senate as we speak. For the average viewer out there, you don't understand what we are talking about. Let me put it in basic terms. The reconciliation process is a part of the Budget Control Act, which basically gives us the ability to reconcile current policies with what we are dealing with, with respect to our spending, debt, and deficits. We have to make that all add up, and we are supposed to do that in a way that would yield deficit neutrality or deficit reduction. That is the general purpose of why we have reconciliation. Reconciliation, though, because there is a 60-vote threshold in the Senate and that means that certain policies that the majority wants to get in place in the House and the Senate if they control both Chambers, often hit resistance by the minority party in the Senate, that then reconciliation is used to end-run what we call the filibuster--even though it is really just a 60-vote threshold, end-run that in order to get policy even though we are supposedly not doing policy on reconciliation.…”