Political Quotes

“for the information of the Senators, we are about to move to the consideration of the amendment by the Senator from Utah. I want to take about 1 minute to talk about it. The leader will speak, and then I will move to table the amendment. Depending on the outcome of the amendment, there may be other votes this afternoon. I thank Senators for working well together. We have had six votes. We have had 20 that we think we can work out, more or less, in a managers' package. The Senator from Utah, by the way, has been very helpful in getting us to that point. Yet I am going to move to table his amendment, and I want to explain why. This is an authorizing amendment. It belongs on the authorizing bill. This is an appropriations bill. We have worked very hard over the last few weeks, under Chairman Shelby's leadership and Senator Leahy's leadership, to try to keep such amendments off of our appropriations bill so that we can get to a result. It has been a long time since this body has done what it is supposed to do under the appropriations process. This is the first week of that process. If we table the amendment that is about to come up, we will be able to complete our work, I believe, today or Monday and be off to a good start with about two dozen amendments in a process that is of the kind that we have been saying for weeks we want to see. So, while I totally agree with the Senator's amendment and have voted for it many, many times, this is not the place for it.”