Douglas Alexander: “I thought the Congress got off to a pretty good start this year. The President and the House of Representatives agreed…”

“I thought the Congress got off to a pretty good start this year. The President and the House of Representatives agreed on an economic stimulus package. All of us had different ideas about it, but the President and the House agreed on something, sent it over here, and we had what I would call a principled debate about it--a disagreement over whether to spend $40 billion more on it than the House-passed legislation, and the Senate objected to that. That was dropped. Then we passed it, sent it to the President, and he signed it. That spirit of having a principled argument, resolving it, and helping the American people got us off to a good start. We did the same thing on the FISA legislation Senator Kyl, the Senator from Arizona, just described. He was a major force in that. That was a principled debate as well. Samuel Huntington, the distinguished Harvard professor who is the former president of the American Political Science Association, says that most of our conflicts in our democracy are conflicts between or among principles, with which most of us agree--for example, liberty and security.”