Political Quotes

“I rise to talk about the short-term budget resolution we will be voting on within the next couple of days and a quote the President made this morning. The bipartisan agreement we are going to tackle on the floor to extend the Federal budget past the CR deadline through the end of September is salutary. It is salutary because the two Houses worked together to find an agreement. I can see things in the agreement I like, and I can see things in the agreement I don't like. That is the nature of budget agreements. My principal disappointment with the agreement is that we should have done it in December. I will actually give credit to my Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle. We were ready to do this deal in December. The Appropriations Committees in both Houses had met. We were ready to do a deal that would then give everybody in government--but, more importantly, all of our citizens and all of our businesses--some certainty about what would happen between that vote in December and the end of the fiscal year, September 30. The incoming administration, not yet in office, dispatched the Vice President and others to the Hill and said: Don't do a budget. Don't do the omnibus bill. We want to have the ability to work on it ourselves. I think this was against the better judgment of both sides in the Senate. A decision was made: We won't do an omnibus bill in December. We recessed on the 10th. We had plenty of time to get work done.…”