Political Quotes

“on June 11--a month and a half ago--in a very strong bipartisan way, the Senate voted 93 to 3--an overwhelming vote--to pass legislation written by Senator John McCain, a Republican, and myself to address crises facing our veterans community and the VA and to protect and defend the men and women who have put their lives on the line to defend us. I wish to take this opportunity again to thank Senator McCain for his very strong efforts on getting that legislation passed. As you know, the legislation we passed was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO, to cost about $35 billion. At just about the same time, the House of Representatives passed legislation dealing with, more or less, the same issues, and the bill they passed in the House was estimated by CBO to cost $44 billion--$9 billion more than what we passed in the Senate. In the last 6 weeks, my staff, my colleagues, and I have been working very hard to refine this legislation, to come up with a more reasonable pricetag, and to address the needs of our veterans community in a significant way. In that process, I have been accused by some of ``moving the goalposts.'' I guess I have. I have moved the goalposts so the legislation we are introducing today is substantially lower-- substantially lower--than what passed the Senate and what passed the House. If that is called moving the goalposts, I suspect in this case it is moving the goalposts in a positive direction.…”