Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from Oregon for his kind comments, and I know, as the ranking member of the Committee on Finance, he will be doing a lot of things to see that things in this budget happen, and I suspect they will happen a lot the way they are here. I would like to mention just a couple of things, though, for him to note because he mentioned the wildfire suppression. I know how passionate he and Senator Crapo have been on wildfire suppression. I want him to note that section 3208 preserves the wildfire suppression funding. One of the things that has always concerned me since I got here was that we have these emergencies for all sorts of things. When I first got here, they were $5 billion a year; now they are up to $7 billion a year. But any time you are budgeting and you know something is going to happen every year, it ought to be in the budget. So I put in $7 billion for emergencies, and that will help to provide some of the funding for his suggestion of the wildfire suppression. A couple of the other paragraphs the Senator from Oregon would be interested in are 4319 and 4320. We did not throw out everything. We did do some combining of ones that were very similar to make sure that in the 183 proposals we had for reserve funds, we could come up with a few fewer that would incorporate the ideas of everyone. Some of the previous speeches mentioned what we were doing to Medicare.…”