Some excerpts:
“I think both sides need to understand that nobody has complete control of the elected government, so neither side is going to get everything they’d like. You know, I’d like to defund Planned Parenthood, but I understand that Republicans don’t have complete control of the elected government, so I think what we should do is cut spending as much as we can, get the policy changes that we can, but move on because there are other bigger battles that we ought to be fighting.”
“You know how this works. Everybody’s got a seat at the table. Everybody’s got a vote so to speak. The president does by virtue of the veto. So we just need to recognize, we can’t dictate all the terms. We should aggressively go for everything we can get and then move on. I think the debt limit is a bigger, more important fight that we ought to be focusing on right now, and really not wasting all this time over what is, by comparison, a relatively small matter.”
“There’s a sense of enormous frustration. I don’t know a single one of us that wants to see a shutdown. It’s not so much that we’re afraid of it, it’s just that we think it’s terrible policy. Frankly, it’s very frustrating for me because, as you know, the Democrats had complete control of the elected government during the year last year when all of this should have been done and put to rest. But they didn’t pass a budget; they didn’t do their appropriation bills; they kicked these spending cans down the road; and now, we’re almost bystanders to the extent that this is really a negotiation between Harry Reid and John Boehner and the president, and what we’re talking about everyday within the Republican conference in the Senate is what are we going to do about the structural process reform we need before we raise this debt limit? What are we going to do about a budget for next year? We’d really like to be working on the big picture for the future of how we’re going to encourage economic growth and get spending under control, but it’s hard to make progress on those things when we’re mired in this, as I say, relatively small matter.”
“I want to cut spending as much as anyone in this town; I want a pro-growth policy, but I’ve been here before, and I understand that you can’t always get your way. What you got to do is get the best arrangement you can, get the biggest cuts in spending we can right now, and then move on and fight a bigger battle. As I say, I think the debt limit is a more important one; it’s more substantive; it’s a bigger deal; the White House is in the exactly wrong position on both substance and the politics of it, frankly. So I think we should get this done and move on to where we could have much more important progress.”
