Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I was hearing my friend across the aisle. He was yelling about things not being paid for when, actually, what happened was, in my first 2 years here, in 2005 and 2006, our friends across the aisle pointed out to voters, These guys are running a $100 billion, $200 billion budget, so elect us, put us in the majority, and we will stop the insane deficit spending. We will make sure every bill is paid for. So the voters took them up on that. They gave our friends across the aisle, Mr. Speaker, the majority, and said, Okay, you guys say you won't deficit spend like the Republicans had started doing. The Republicans balanced the budget in the late 1990s, but they got away from it and got giddy when President Bush got elected. So, in January 2007, it was the Democrats' job to do what they had promised the voters they would do. That promise has not been kept. PAYGO was passed as a rule, but then that promise was not kept. I voted for PAYGO previously but not this last time because I found out it was a joke, that it was not intended to do what it said because, every time a bill comes along that they want to pass, they just do a rule that goes around it. There was no sense in that. This could be easily paid for. For all of those people whose eyes we look into who have lost their jobs--we see them at job fairs, and we see them around, looking for jobs--we've got to tell them that we have all of these little pet projects that we don't want to give up the money for.…”