Political Quotes

“Thank you, Madam Speaker. I also would like to thank and congratulate the previous speaker for her outstanding summary of some of the issues that will be facing this House later this week. It is, as she said, a bill that will enhance big banking at the expense of small community banking. Her hard work on this issue is appreciated on both sides of the aisle. Thank you very much to the gentlelady for that excellent summary of the bill. There are so many issues about which, if we could work together on a bipartisan basis, I feel we could come up with better legislation. What I intend to talk about this evening is an area about which we have not had much bipartisan dialogue. That is, of course, over the budget, our debt and the deficit. It is official now. We will not have a budget this year. This will be the first time since the Budget Act of 1974 was passed, creating the system we have for budgeting and for making expenditures now, that we will not have had a budget. It is the very first time since 1974. Every year, the House has passed a budget. I believe, almost every year, the Senate has passed a budget. There were years when they haven't agreed, but every year, the House met its obligation and passed a budget. You know, the current chairman of the House Budget Committee, who, of course, is a member of the majority party, has said, if you can't budget, you can't govern. I couldn't agree more. If you can't budget, you can't govern. We are not going to budget this year.…”