Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I agree with our colleagues that a government shutdown is not the best way to do business around here. We should get together--the President, the House, and the Senate--and we should work this out, both the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling, of which Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew has said he will basically run out of all of the extraordinary measures he can use to avoid us reaching the debt ceiling--which, colloquially speaking, I would say is the equivalent of maxing out your credit card, the Federal Government's credit card. But it is worth remembering that as James Baker, former Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State, with a distinguished record of public service going back many years--he recently noted in an article in the Wall Street Journal that since 1976 we have had 17 government shutdowns temporarily until differences between the parties, between the branches could be worked out. I hope we can do that sooner rather than later. The truth is that there was a way out with regard to the shutdown, particularly when the House passed a piece of legislation that would maintain the spending limits at $988 billion, which was the same level the Senate majority had chosen, but it also attached two other provisions to it, one of which would have eliminated the carve-out for Congress for ObamaCare--in other words, the carve-out that treats Congress differently than the rest of the country.…”