Earlier this week, the Senate voted on amendments to the long bill, which in shorthand is the state budget as recommended by the Joint Budget Committee.  According to insiders, everyone praised the JBC for its work on the bill, and then went out to spew hate about the budget.  Why?  Because most of their amendments did not make the bill. Oh, and it was highly partisan (actually, it wasn’t – Democratic Sens. Steadman, Garcia, and Kefalas voted for the bill with Republicans).

In response to Dems’ whining, Senate President Bill Cadman offered an epic speech reminding Democrats whose bills the budget funded.  See the epic speech below.

We’ve also curated select quotes zingers from the speech because they burned:

  • I heard a lot of interesting things yesterday and today…. We were shut out, there was a lock down, shame on us.
  • There was no lockdown.  If I had that kind of power, I would have run amendments to the long bill yesterday….  In the nine hours where nobody was shut out, nobody was shutdown, where every amendment received a fair review just like it always does, just like it always has, regardless of who is in the majority….
  • How many times did we hear from this microphone, we were budgeting to current law, we were budgeting to current law, we were budgeting to current law? Do you know where we got the current law?  From the previous legislatures. From the previous legislatures.  Who was in the majority then? We are paying for your budget this year.  We’re paying for your bills this year. We’re paying for your laws, actually, they’re our laws.  We were here, too.  We sure saw a lot of 16-19s then, but nobody complained about that at this microphone.
  • If you don’t like what happened yesterday, you ought to look back into the past to see what you did that you didn’t like, and I’m not even going to ask for an apology.
  • Where is the partisan bill shoved through here shutting out everybody?  Oh yeah.  It doesn’t exist.
  • That’s not a partisan budget.  It’s not “our” budget. It’s our budget from our JBC members and just because you didn’t get your amendment on or you thought you were shut out, which you weren’t – you can’t shut down anybody in this building in nine hours. I was trying (we think he was kidding).
  • Three plus three is how we got to where we are.

Somehow, we suspect that Dems will think twice before being whiny babies about not getting their way in the future after this tongue-lashing by Cadman.