Setting the state budget is one of the most important tasks we undertake at the state Capitol - because after all, it's the people's money - not the government's.
It is difficult even now for the President to avoid giving his approbation to any law appropriating money for a road or canal.
We in Congress have the money but we don’t have the expertise.
My conviction of the necessity of further legislative provisions for the safe-keeping and disbursement of the public moneys and my opinion in regard to the measures best adapted to the accomplishment of those objects have been already submitted to you.
It is not for the State Department or even the Secretary of State to say when and how the resources of the American people will be spent.
I object to you using words like squander and pork. What is pork in one part of the country is an essential project in another part.
No expense has been incurred but what has been approved of and provided for by Parliament.
Let me make it clear: The Disbursement Allocation Program is not pork barrel. Of the DAP releases in 2011 and 2012, only nine percent was disbursed for projects suggested by legislators. The DAP is not theft. Theft is illegal.
Congress has a responsibility to review research paid for by hard-working American taxpayers.
We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right [individually] to appropriate a dollar of the public money.
Homeland Security money ought not to be allocated on a pork barrel basis.
The President sends us a billion-page paper that shows how he would spend the money if he were spending the money. He doesn't have the authority to spend the money. He doesn't spend $1 of the money.
The last thing you want is a group of senators who just lent you seven and a half billion dollars to sit back and go, 'Look at these jerks and how they're using taxpayer money.'
I firmly believe that if members of Congress fail to perform their most basic duty in passing a budget, then they do not deserve to be paid.
I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds ... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.
