Political Quotes

“the bill we are considering now was made available to us at 11 p.m. last night, long after the Senate was out of session. This is it. Now, I daresay that I doubt any of my colleagues have read this bill. I have not, I confess. Yet we are going to be voting on it in about 3 hours. We have relied on our staff to tell us what is in this bill, and we found some very interesting things. There are changes from when the bill passed the Senate. My colleagues need to know what some of these changes are. I would note, by the way, that the middle-of-the-night, behind-closed-doors way this legislation was created is a far cry from what the President requested of us and promised on his Web site. He talks about ending the practice of writing legislation behind closed doors. He says: By making these practices public, the American people will be able to hold their leaders accountable for wasteful spending, and lawmakers won't be able to slip favors for lobbyists into bills at the last minute. Well, would that it were. So, unfortunately, it looks as though a lot of favors were inserted for a lot of folks. I don't know whether it was because lobbyists requested it, but there are sure a lot of things that relate to specific Members and specific States. And, as I said, many of these items were not even included in the Senate-passed bill.”