Political Quotes

“I say to the Presiding Officer, I am glad you are here to replace me as the Presiding Officer of the Senate. I spent the last hour of the Senate presiding, and for those of you in the Gallery who don't know these things, I will pull back the curtain a little bit. It is called Presiding Officer duty, not Presiding Officer privilege or honor, because it is reserved for the young Senators who are new to the Senate, such as Senator Sullivan and me. It also means that we actually have to listen to our colleagues' speeches, which doesn't happen very often around here anymore. This morning I had the privilege of listening to the Democratic leader's speech about our tax bill and the fact that we are going to repeal the hated mandate of ObamaCare as part of this tax bill, and I just can't let stand what he said without correcting the record. First, the Senator from New York said that we are ``injecting healthcare into the tax bill.'' Injecting healthcare into the tax bill? I would remind him and all the other Democrats who have been denouncing this decision on the Senate Finance Committee that the individual mandate is a tax according not to me, not to Republicans, but to the Obama administration. That is what they argued in 2012 to the Supreme Court, even though they contended throughout the debate on ObamaCare in 2009 and 2010 that it wasn't a tax. In 2012, they argued to the Supreme Court that the ObamaCare mandate is a tax, and the Supreme Court upheld it as a tax.…”