John Cornyn: “we need to work together. That is the only way this is going to happen. We know it will happen. It is going to happen.…”

“we need to work together. That is the only way this is going to happen. We know it will happen. It is going to happen. The President cannot take the unsustainable position that ``it is my way or the highway and I will not negotiate,'' especially since he has done it before, especially since that is the only way our constitutional framework allows the resolution of problems. If we were to do--which we are not going to do--what the President and the majority leader have asked us to do, which is to raise the debt limit automatically without dealing with any of our long-term fiscal problems, we would simply be encouraging Congress and our policymakers to delay the tough choices and hard votes. We would be encouraging-- indeed, we would be enabling--this type of fiscal profligacy that has left us with a gross national debt of $17 trillion, which is about $53,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. More than $6 trillion of debt has been added since President Obama became President of the United States. Yet the President seems to show absolutely no sense of urgency in dealing with it. That is despite his own fiscal commission, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, coming back in December 2010--that was a bipartisan commission he himself appointed-- they came back with their own policy prescription to deal with this problem.…”