Political Quotes

“I appreciate all of the speeches being given, and all of them have a seed of possibility. But evidently we are not going to water them or try to grow them. We are just going to talk about possibilities. There is enough blame to go around. It isn't just on one side. But I would like to remind people of why we are here, hoping that we won't be here again. The reason we are here is we didn't do the appropriations bills the way we are supposed to. I know we had a budget process, and the budget process got bogged down between the House and the Senate. But obviously we have gotten past that problem, because I noticed on the calendar we have a whole bunch of appropriations bills--I think, actually, all 12 of them that we are supposed to pass--and the first one went on the calendar on June 27. Obviously they didn't feel constrained by not having a budget that was agreed to by the House and the Senate. They set some parameters and came up with bills. So we are past that budget argument that there was no conference committee. I thought there should be a conference committee, but there wasn't a conference committee. While we are talking about conference committees, I have to mention the last offer from the House we voted on in regard to this shutdown was a request by the House to have a conference committee--a conference committee made up of the Senate and House--to work out these problems before the shutdown went on this long.…”