Political Quotes

“I come to the floor today, as so many of my colleagues have, to discuss the situation we find ourselves in. Many ask: What has happened? Why are we here? Why is there so much coverage and concern about a potential shutdown of the United States Government? I was on a radio station report from Washington by phone to Wyoming earlier this morning with a friend of mine, and he was asking how we got into this situation and what we can do about it. Well, there are two different situations we are in. One is, we are in this situation because a budget, a responsible budget, that should have been passed 7 months ago--when the Democrats were in charge of the House, in charge of the Senate, and in the White House--was never passed. That is what we are dealing with today in one part. The bigger part of how we got into this situation is that we are a nation in significant debt. We owe a remarkably large amount of money-- $14 trillion is the number that is consistently discussed. Very few people have a concept of exactly how much money that is. Yet we owe that amount of money. People say: Who do we owe it to? I visited with a group of high school students from Douglas, WY, earlier this week, and I asked them: Do you know who we owe the money to? They said: Yeah, we owe a lot of it to China.…”