Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from Maryland and I thank my colleague from Wisconsin for their bipartisan effort today. I'm pleased to be an original cosponsor of the Expedited Legislative Line-Item Veto and Rescissions Act, and I urge my colleagues to support it. I'm listening to the concerns from our friends on both sides of the aisle, especially those on the Appropriations Committee, and I'm not unsympathetic to the constitutional concerns raised about what does this do to the balance of power. I believe our friend from Wisconsin, the chairman of the Budget Committee, very ably just explained how this framework takes cognizance of those concerns and guarantees that while we give the President an opportunity to take another look at the whole bill and make some excisions, it also gives us another crack, an up-or- down on whether we agree or we don't. I believe that we as an institution cannot have it both ways. We can't say that we are obsessed with the national debt, but when a statutory remedy is at hand to try to address it, we say ``no'' because of an argument about prerogatives. The debt is so large and it isn't, I say to my friend from Illinois, a matter of Democrats or Republicans. No hands are clean when it comes to the national debt. But we have in front of us one more tool to add to PAYGO, to add to the sequestration process, and hopefully other debt-relief measures.…”