Political Quotes

“Mr. President, first of all, let me comment on what Senator Cardin said about one of the purposes of this effort, which is to get a bill to the floor so the managers can work on it. As we have proven in the last couple of months on a number of bills, and the Senator has pointed this out, if we can get the bill to the floor for the managers to be able to work with our colleagues on amendments, we can legislate. The problem has been that we have not been able to get bills to the floor because of this blockage, the blockage caused by the overuse of the filibuster and, more accurately, the threat of a filibuster on the motion to proceed, which, in turn-- and my Republican friends believe this very keenly--was caused by the use of filling the tree, which meant that they would not have the opportunity to offer amendments. So they would then use that threat of a filibuster in order to try to gain assurance that they would be able to offer some amendments. That is the heart of the compromise we proposed. There are a lot of other aspects to it, including trying to get rid of these filibusters on going to conference; including these filibusters that tied up nominations with postcloture 30-hours, nominations that were going to pass with votes of 90 to 0.…”