Political Quotes

“I have been here most of the day listening to comments about the budget. I am fascinated by the budget speculation that has gone on here. Of course, I do know I only had 6 weeks to make up a budget for us to debate, and add to, subtract from, and then to conference. But a lot of what has been said is not actually in the budget. Of course, one of the comments was that it should be a bipartisan budget. In the whole time I have been here, there has not been a bipartisan budget. The majority party has always gotten to take the lead and outline what they see as a vision. But in the past, I remember we used to do our opening statements on the budget in the Budget Committee and then get a copy of the budget we had just commented on. I thought that was wrong. I provided them with it the day before the statements were made so they could make better comments on the budget and have better amendments. What I really would have liked to have done is to have released it even a little earlier. I proposed this to them in exchange for them doing their amendments in advance so we could see their amendments and they could see our amendments. That would lead to a much more bipartisan budget event. That was not agreed to. Now we are down to the point where we are talking about this final conference report, where we have gotten the House and the Senate to agree on a position. I noticed a lot of people today said we were cutting highways. We are not cutting highways.…”