Political Quotes

“Mr. President, the Constitution would always trump, but that is a misinterpretation of what we are doing here. Let me play this out, because I am pretty confident I know how this is going to work if this is pursued. What would happen in January is there would be a request for a ruling by the Parliamentarian, and the Parliamentarian would correctly rule that in order to change the rules you need two- thirds of the Senate. Then they would use the procedure of overruling our Parliamentarian with a majority vote. That will then stand as the ruling for the Senate. Very clearly what you are doing is you are skirting both the Constitution and the rules of the Senate. Let me, if I might, take the Senator's question and show the shocking result we are going to end up with. Do you realize there was a day in this body where judges were not filibustered? We can look at Supreme Court judges who might be controversial to one side or the other who were approved by a majority vote. So what happened? My friends on the other side of the aisle sat down, they brought in some constitutional scholar. He said: Well, why are you not filibustering judges? And now it is very routine and very common-- and both sides do it. So here is what is going to happen. Every time you have a majority that comes to power--and we all know the pendulum swings. In our lifetime we will see Republicans returned to the majority.…”