Political Quotes

“I come here to speak on a different topic, but I want to simply comment for a moment on the exchange between my friend from Louisiana and my friend from Florida. I can assure my friend from Louisiana who was ranked the best managed State in America by an independent source, Governing Magazine--the Commonwealth of Virginia--at least during my tenure as Governor. We are also proud to be ranked by Forbes Magazine the best State for business. I have looked at the bill of the Senator from Louisiana. It may not be perfect. I actually think we should be voting on it. I think it is a bit strange to me, and I say this as somebody from Virginia, where I am very proud of the fact that we have maintained a AAA bond rating. We are fiscally responsible. Our fiscal health, I would wager, is candidly better than virtually every other State in the country. We made the hard choices to make that happen. When we say that we are going to come in and bail out the airlines because they have lost revenues and we are going to come in and very generously take care of every small business when they have lost revenues, but when States and localities across the country are losing revenues at a record rate, to say we are not going to give them certain flexibility--I would concur, if we had a bill like that, and I would even put a clause and support a clause in place that would say let's prohibit any of those funds being used to take care of long-term obligations like pension funds.…”