Leadership Quote by Jo Bonner

This is Washington’s most practiced form of understatement: forecast the next crisis while pretending you’re simply being responsible. Bonner’s “certain” does double duty. It signals managerial calm - we’ve got this - and quietly primes the listener for escalation. “More emergency supplemental bills” is procedural language that drains the drama out of what is, by definition, a drama: a government returning to Congress again and again because the original plan didn’t match reality or the political appetite for a single, honest price tag wasn’t there.

The key word is “process.” It turns an open-ended fiscal commitment into something that sounds finite, orderly, almost apolitical. Not a war, not a disaster, not a cascading failure - a process with stages, as if the work is merely moving through a pipeline. That framing matters because supplementals are where accountability often goes to nap: less scrutiny, faster timelines, fewer opportunities for opponents to litigate tradeoffs.

Then there’s the coy gesture toward gravity: “a point I have repeated several times recently.” He’s invoking repetition as credibility, the politician’s version of evidence. He doesn’t state the point here; he signals that the public should trust he’s been consistent, that he’s already done the explaining somewhere else. “Enormity” provides the moral and emotional permission slip for more spending, while “keeps ... in perspective” reassures fiscal hawks that this isn’t panic, it’s proportion.

In context - early 2000s-era governance shaped by war funding and disaster response - the line reads like advance inoculation: expect bigger numbers, fewer fights over why, and a narrative in which necessity, not choice, drives the next bill.