Political Quotes

“I oppose this legislation, and I would like to focus my comments on the balanced budget amendment because the dirty little secret about the balanced budget amendment is that it does not require a balanced budget. {time} 1830 It will actually make it more difficult for future Congresses to balance the budget, so the title is just misleading. Let's go through some of the provisions. The first provision of the balanced budget amendment requires a budget not in balance to require a three-fifths vote in the House and the Senate. The fact is every budget that we considered this year--in fact, most of the budgets, virtually every budget in the last 10 years--was not balanced in the first year. So all of those budgets, including the Republican Ryan plan, even the Republican Study Committee plan, would have required a three-fifths vote to pass in both the House and the Senate. Now, the deficit reduction requires tough votes, often career-ending votes. The 1993 Clinton budget that was on the way to paying off the national debt, if we hadn't changed it after 2001, we would have paid off the entire debt held by the public. By now, we would owe nothing to China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. But that didn't get three-fifths of the vote, and 50 Democrats lost their seats as a result of that plan. Likewise, this year's Republican Ryan plan, which repeals Medicare as we know it, is a good deficit reduction plan.…”