Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we are going to withhold the unanimous consent agreement at this time. There have been a number of questions raised about it. The time is being well spent actually. Those questions need to be asked, but there are enough of them so that we will pick that up on Monday. But we are making good progress. We are going to have another 17 cleared amendments that will be coming up, we hope, in the next 5 or 10 minutes. We have already disposed of 77 amendments. I think we have done it in a way which will make this body proud that we are legislating. If people want to filibuster, threaten to filibuster or debate something, we are going to say: Come over and debate--which we have. So we have avoided these long periods of space. We have had no threat of a filibuster that has required a threshold of 60. We have had majority votes, and not the 60-threshold votes except for that one technical budget amendment issue. We are making great progress. I believe we will continue to make progress. The leader, in a moment, I believe, is going to a file cloture motion which is going to help with progress. But between now and the time we vote on cloture, both this afternoon and on Monday, we are going to continue to work on amendments to try to clear amendments. I am sure we will voice-vote amendments in the cases that they have been cleared and do not require a voice vote. The leader will, in a moment, again, state what his plans are.…”