Senator Warner delivered an impassioned plea for fiscal responsibility yesterday at a Joint Economic Committee hearing on the economic costs of debt-ceiling brinkmanship. With the government’s short-term funding resolution running out at the end of the month and a default on the nation’s debt looming in mid-October, Senator Warner called for both parties to put aside rhetoric and partisanship and work together.

“It’s stunning to me that anyone who would claim economic expertise would say that messing with the full faith and credit of the United States of America is a responsible action,” Senator Warner said. “There’s been no major industrial nation that has ever gone through a significant default and recovered... We candidly ought to all get fired if we don’t raise this debt limit.”

“I respect my colleagues and the people on the panel who say that we need to control spending,” he said in response to a witness who claimed cutting spending alone could fix the nation’s budget crisis. “We absolutely do. And I’ve laid out a series of plans with Republicans and Democrats that make major changes to entitlements, but I find it stunning that people think this can be solved on one side of the balance sheet.”

Senator Warner called the continuing resolution passed in January to fund the government on a short-term basis, a “bad deal and missed opportunity” to deal with our larger deficit problems, and said sequestration was set up to be the “stupidest thing we could do” so that lawmakers wouldn’t allow it to happen.

“I would ask any of my colleagues in either party to come with me to NIH [National Institutes of Health] or Hampton Roads, where we have so many of our military installations,” he said, “And see the cancer that is eating at the insides of people who are making a long term commitment to public service or our nation’s safety.”

“I tell you,” Senator Warner remarked, “I think that we are really playing with fire this time.”