Russ Feingold: “today's vote is the first part of a three-step budget reconciliation package that actually leaves this Nation's budget…”

“today's vote is the first part of a three-step budget reconciliation package that actually leaves this Nation's budget worse off than it is now, not by tens of millions of dollars, which itself would have been a disservice to the American public, but by tens of billions of dollars. Using reconciliation to push through legislation that will worsen our budget deficit and add billions more to the mountain of debt our children and grandchildren will have to pay is a perversion of a process designed to expedite measures to reduce the deficit. Reconciliation was intended to help facilitate the enactment of measures to reduce the deficit. It is ironic, to say the least, that it should be used to enact measures that only aggravate our budget deficits and increase our massive debt. No one who has served in this body for the past 10 years, and especially the past 4\1/2\ years, should pretend to be shocked, however. This is only the latest abuse of a reconciliation process that in recent years has been the principal tool used to enact some of the most reckless fiscal policies in recent history. But for even the most cynical, there are new lows in this bill, most notably the use of reconciliation to jam through a controversial policy measure to permit drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.…”