Political Quotes

“Thank you, Madam President. I thank my colleague from Vermont who has done an able job as the ranking member on the Budget Committee. I rise today to talk about the budget resolution that we are considering on the floor of the Senate this week. I came to the Senate in 2013 with a background as a mayor and a Governor. I believe in getting budgets done and getting them done on time. Doing budgets under regular order is an important priority, and I have enjoyed and look forward to more work with colleagues on budgeting matters. Quickly, we have been in a budget crisis of our own making in Congress. It is not someone else's fault. It is not the President's fault. The budget crisis we have been in has been of Congress's making. In August of 2011, when one House pushed the country to the verge of defaulting on our debt for the first time in our history, in order not to default we came up with the idea of the sequester. This was before I was in the Senate, but the basic idea was this: Let's impose punishing across-the-board cuts on all of these Federal spending levels to begin in March of 2013 to force us to try to come up with a better deal. I call that ``let's try to do something good, and if we don't, then let's do something really stupid.'' I don't know that this is a principle you should ever apply.…”