Political Quotes

“Mr. President, it has now been 59 days since the Senate and the House passed our budget resolutions. The American people are now expecting us to get together and do everything possible to bridge the partisan divide and come to a bipartisan deal. On this side the Senate Democrats are ready to get to work. Unfortunately, despite their focus over the past 2 years on the need to return to regular order, Republicans have been refusing to allow us to move to a bipartisan budget conference. Many Republicans, including the ranking member on the Budget Committee, Senator Sessions, had been very clear up until recently that after the Senate engages in an open and fair budget markup process--and these are his words--``the work of conferencing must begin.'' Minority Leader McConnell said in January that if the Senate budget is different from the House budget, then ``send it off to conference. That's how things used to work around here. We used to call it legislating.'' I could not agree more with Minority Leader McConnell's words from back in January. Over the past few weeks we have tried to move to conference eight times, and each time Senate Republicans have stood and said no. They have managed to stall for weeks now, but their excuses for not wanting to move to conference are changing. At first Republicans told us that we needed ``a framework'' before they would allow us to move to conference, although they never explained what that meant. And, frankly, a budget is a framework.…”