Political Quotes

“Madam President, we will soon vote on whether to invoke cloture on S. 1197, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014. This bill was reported out of the Armed Services Committee with a strong bipartisan vote of 23 to 3. We have enacted a National Defense Authorization Act every year for more than 50 years, and it is critically important that we do so again this year. We spent all day yesterday debating two amendments addressing sexual assault in the military, but we have not been allowed to vote on them. There was opposition on the other side to voting even on those two amendments which have now been fully debated. We were told that Senators wouldn't let us vote on the sexual assault amendments because they were afraid those would be the only votes. We offered to lock in additional amendments, six for Democrats, six for Republicans. That got an objection. Staff had built up a cleared amendment package of 39 additional amendments on a bipartisan basis, about half for each side, that were all agreed to on the merits. Again, we got thwarted. So over and over, we had objections to considering amendments, based on the accusation that we were not considering enough amendments. But how on earth does blocking the consideration of amendments that we can all agree on advance the cause of considering amendments? I am going to continue to work with my friend from Oklahoma--and we are good friends and we work together well. He is right.…”