Political Quotes

“I yield myself as much time as I may consume. There are two big problems with this. First of all, it's a 1-year solution. It would eliminate sequestration for fiscal year 2013 alone. And as we have seen this year already, the constant every year wondering whether or not something this large is going to happen is enormously disruptive to our economy and enormously disruptive to our defense industry and all the other places that suffer sequestration. This sets us up for another 1 year after 1 year after 1 year, as we have seen with expiring tax cuts, with expiring proposed cuts to Medicare. This every year trying to figure out whether or not we are going to deal with it is almost as damaging as the cuts themselves. So whatever we do here, we're going to have to come up with a 10-year solution. We're going to have to come up with the $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions that are necessary to avoid sequestration. And I agree with my colleagues--coming up with that money and avoiding sequestration is enormously important, but simply doing it 1 year at a time really doesn't help. The second problem with this is the way it is structured. It takes defense out of the possibility of facing sequestration and dumps it all on the rest of the discretionary budget. And what happens here basically is the Republican proposal on this is defense should not be touched, and there should be no revenue, and we have to deal with an over trillion-dollar deficit.…”