Patrick Leahy: “We talk about how many votes there may be and we talk about this debate, which, incidentally, has been interfered with…”

“We talk about how many votes there may be and we talk about this debate, which, incidentally, has been interfered with in some ways over the weekend, at the same time we talk about evil money in politics. We have seen some so-called ``independent'' expenditures in running ads on this. They are about as independent as absolutely nothing. I think it is unfortunate that apparently the proponents of this constitutional amendment do not feel that they can make their case well enough on the Senate floor. They have to do this. We talk about whether it is one vote or not. Let us talk about votes. In 1993, we started down this road to concerted, consistent deficit reduction. We did that without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate for the President's budget. After 12 years of ever-larger deficits, voted for by the Republican Members of Congress, when we finally started cutting the deficit, not a single Republican Member voted to do that. Over the last 4 years, we have succeeded in reducing the deficit by 63 percent. It went up for 12 years; the national debt went up. We started bringing the deficit down. When President Clinton took office, the deficit was at its highest point ever--$290 billion. Today, the deficit is at its lowest dollar figure since 1981, $107 billion. In fact, it is at the lowest point as a percentage of the economy since 1974.”