Tammy Baldwin: “I am most honored to be a member of the Committee on the Budget, and I want to commend the gentleman from South Carolina…”

“I am most honored to be a member of the Committee on the Budget, and I want to commend the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt) and the other members of our committee this evening for laying out what I think is a critical message at a moment of critical importance. I came to this Congress just about 4 years ago at a moment of what I regarded as real opportunity. I was excited about the fact that we were whittling away at the deficit and, in fact, on this upswing towards surplus. We were really paying down our national debt, and things were going in an extraordinarily hopeful direction. I viewed the moment that I came to Congress as an opportunity to start responding to some unmet challenges in this Nation. Perhaps we could call it righting the domestic wrongs that still exist. Well, clearly, we are now in a very, very different time. We are now looking at deficits for as far as the eye can see and squandering an opportunity which I think has been squandered for a wide multiplicity of reasons, but a number of them have to do with ill-advised policies enacted by the majority in this last 2 years.”