Political Quotes

“Well, Mr. President, reclaiming the floor, now you have it in stark clarity. This bill proposes to spend more than we agreed to spend passing the Ryan-Murray Act a few weeks ago. President Obama signed it 2 months ago. The ink is hardly dry on it, and here we have another bill to raise that, to raise the spending again. And it will not be the only one. We are going to see bill after bill after bill, and it is part of the President's strategy. What is it? The era of austerity is over. He signed Ryan-Murray. He signed the Budget Control Act. But he had no intention of complying with it. He will not support enforcement of it. That is a failure of leadership of a monumental proportion. It is a stunning event. I do not know why we have a Congress, why we pass laws that say we are only going to spend so much money and then we waltz in, just a few weeks later, and spend billions more than we agreed to. And, oh, we will just waive the budget we just passed. Oh, this is important. But everybody knew when we passed the limits on spending that there were going to be important bills. I am actually shocked, even by Senate and congressional standards, how blase this body has been about these laws. I thought at least people would pretend to honor them. There is no pretense here. And it is a failure of responsibility in this body if such spending were to pass. So our colleagues voted to cut the retirement pay of veterans, which I opposed and Republicans opposed.…”