Russ Feingold: “I will see if I can do 22 years in 1 minute. First, there were 12 years of Republican Presidents who said they were…”

“I will see if I can do 22 years in 1 minute. First, there were 12 years of Republican Presidents who said they were going to provide a balanced budget. Instead, they brought us up to the biggest deficit and debt in the history of this country. Then there was a 4-year period which we are in the middle of now where a Democratic President provided the kind of glidepath and direction that the Senator from South Carolina is talking about. What happened? The deficit, for the first time since Harry Truman, went down for 3 years in a row. Those are the facts. Not a single Republican in either House of this institution voted to help us on these specifics. Now we go to the third stage, a 7-year period when the States will get to decide whether or not they want to have a balanced budget amendment, as the majority party in both Houses here increases taxes for everybody in the country to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and increases the defense budget and tries to tell you that is going to balance the Federal budget. The fact is that the President is going to give his speech tonight. He is the only President who has provided a true, specific path and true progress in the direction of deficit reduction, and no matter how much the Republicans say that is not the case, it is a fact.”