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Toomey: Democratic Senate Responsible For Rushed Cliff Deal

Senator Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) pointed at the Democrat majority in the Senate for the reason why the Fiscal Cliff debt deal struck was rushed and contentious.

When asked by the Huffington Post's Sam Stein on MSNBC this morning if he had enough time to fully review the bill, Toomey stressed how the lack of a Senate-passed bill was the reason why Congress was backed into a deal that lacks fans on either side.

SAM STEIN: I quibble with the idea that you just wouldn't cut the grass. But I want to talk about an aspect of what happened. I got my hands on the actual legislative language of the bill yesterday afternoon and it bore me to death, and there's no way I could read through it without falling asleep. I'm wondering, did you read the legislative language of the bill before voting on it and how many of your colleagues actually read the bill before voting on it?

TOOMEY: My staff and I were poring through it and were looking at it section by section.

STEIN: Do you think it's a problem that lawmakers are getting about maybe ten hours, tops, of lead time to look --

TOOMEY: It's a huge problem. Look, this is ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. But I would argue, this goes back to the dysfunctional senate we have, largely. The House passed a budget the last two years. And I think -- and Senate Republicans have put budgets on the senate floor. If any one of them were operative, we'd be on a sustainable path right now. But Senator Reid and the democratic majority think that it's acceptable not to even have is a budget. so we have no budget, we don't do any appropriation bill, so not one appropriation bill was brought to the senate floor this year. So no wonder our back's up against the wall at midnight and we get this terrible deal that's thrown in our laps that nobody's had enough chance to look at. it's because we haven't gone through a proper, sensible process in the first place.