Joe Manchin: “when I was Governor of West Virginia, we grappled over the budget like every State, every Governor and every…”

“when I was Governor of West Virginia, we grappled over the budget like every State, every Governor and every legislature, every senator and every delegate. But when the deadline arrived, people came together and we did our job--Democrats and Republicans, business and labor, progressives and conservatives--and we enacted a balanced budget every year without failure. It is part of our constitution. It is who we are. I have only been in the Senate for 5 months, and I have never seen anything quite like this. I never could have imagined anything quite like this. But I see so much opportunity if we start talking and working together. We are outspending our revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars every month. They tell us our revenue estimates will be about $2.2 trillion this year, but our expenditures are expected to be over $3.7 trillion. I believe everybody we speak to, and everyone who is listening to us, can understand we have a problem. But yet we are grappling over this tonight: a budget that should have been done 6 months ago. This is a budget crisis. It is not a social crisis. And to put all of this into the mix right now is wrong. Instead of all of us coming together, Republicans and Democrats, with a commonsense budget compromise, we face a shutdown of the government not over how much to cut but over what social issues we agree or disagree on.…”