Political Quotes

“Madam President, I thank my colleague. Sometimes it amazes me how quickly debates change here in Washington. At this time in 2009, President Obama was riding high. Heralded as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt, the conventional wisdom was that his election represented a sea change in the attitudes of American taxpayers. Where his Democratic predecessor came to Congress and announced that the era of big government was over, President Obama came to Washington convinced that the era of big government was just beginning. With historic majorities in both Houses of Congress, he and his Capitol Hill allies set about the business of transforming the Nation's economy with massive jolts of new government spending and regulation. They cultivated an unholy alliance of big labor, big business, and big government, and the hoped-for result was a corporatist state where government bureaucrats would calculate the fair share that business would contribute to finance the administration's redistributionist policies. They exploded the growth of the Federal Government through ordinary appropriations and the stimulus. Democrats hiked up nondefense discretionary appropriations by 24 percent over the last 2 years and by 84 percent if you count the stimulus bill. But, as an American songwriter once put it, the times they are a- changing. Later this week, we will be considering the continuing resolution that gets us to the end of fiscal year 2011.…”