Ari Fleischer Quotes

I think that our leadership, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, are taking the right approach.

It was my privilege to serve with Paul Ryan in the House and on the Ways and Means Committee. Ryan's vast experience and bold, reform-minded ideas were always evident. His knowledge of the federal budget is widely recognized.

I was in the room with, you know, more than a dozen Republicans trying to negotiate the stimulus. Most of them decided the politics of the situation meant they should walk away, even if it wasn't responsible in terms of what our country needed right then.

President Clinton was able to achieve budget surpluses despite a divided government.

Thank God for some Republican control of one branch of the government.

To be honest, I haven't seen much serious budget planning since the Republicans took control of the House after the 2010 elections and grabbed onto the Senate filibuster. It's not the White House's fault that John Boehner couldn't deliver on a bigger deal.

You watch television and see what's going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing's going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress.

The government shut down 12 times under Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill. It was only shut down twice while I was speaker.

With control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, Republicans could have used their unified control of government to... balance the budget!

The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.

Now, so, if you want to blame someone for wasteful spending, the Republicans are in the majority.

Romney and Ryan would do a much better job running the country, and that's what everybody needs to know.

The Republicans have lost their standards; they've lost their principles... Really, that's why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me... They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government.

Partisanship particularly increased after the 1994 elections and then the appearance of the first unified Republican government since the 1950s.

I got elected to run the government more efficiently, lower taxes.

I think what both Republicans and Democrats need to do and the leaders on both sides is to recognize that if sequester takes place, it would be disastrous for our national defense and very frankly for a lot of very important domestic programs. They have a responsibility to come together, find the money necessary to de-trigger sequester.

When Republicans used reconciliation in 2001 for the Bush tax cuts, they used it to increase the deficit. The whole purpose of reconciliation is for deficit reduction!

Make no mistake about it, my friends - Republicans, the American people are never going to forget that it was you who shut down the government of the people.

I recognize that Republicans see a moral difference between a dollar taken away from a millionaire in government benefits and a dollar taken away from a millionaire in taxes.

Clinton passed his first budget without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Before it led to the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, it led to a Democratic defeat in the 1994 midterms.

Obama has been perhaps the most partisan President since Truman. He hasn't learned to be civil - note his insulting speech to Paul Ryan, who did us the courtesy of scoring a budget. The president has to talk to Republicans when it comes to the debt ceiling. He has reached the debt ceiling before anyone expected.

Stimulus spending, permanent bailouts, government takeovers, and federal mandates have all failed our nation. America's employers are afraid to invest in an economy racked with uncertainty over what Washington's next set of rules, regulations, mandates, and tax hikes will look like.

John Boehner is a friend.

To be fair, Republicans are not blameless. The deficit began to spiral out of control on President Bush's watch.

The best thing to hold down spending is to have a Democratic President and a Republican Congress.