Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in reluctant opposition to the amendment offered by my good friend from Tennessee. She makes an excellent point, and I think everyone agrees that we ought to try to rein in this culture of spending and put in place a culture of savings. I have been working my entire congressional career to do that. One of the things that we do in the appropriations process is we have hearings. We listen to people. They try to justify their request. Sometimes when programs work well, they might receive an increase. When people are not doing very well, like the IRS, they have their request denied and are actually funded at lower levels. What is interesting, last night on this floor, we added about $1 billion to our debt reduction by taking that billion dollars out of the IRS. So when we set our priorities, we do that day to day. In this case, we had 12 hearings. If you look at our bill, there are actually nine programs that are just flat out eliminated. They are gone. It wasn't a 1 percent or an X percent cut. It was just, that is not a program that is vital to the functioning of the Federal Government so it is gone. It has been eliminated. There are several agencies where we have reduced their funding because we figured out that they could do with a little bit less.…”