Political Quotes

“I find little objectionable in what my colleague from California said. Certainly there is great opportunity for trade with South Korea and Panama and Colombia to create jobs, but none of those agreements are the topic of the rule before us today. And I want to give a little background on this and talk about how we can move forward. First of all, we could have moved forward in a more bipartisan way had these passed on suspension. What does suspension mean? A suspension requires a two-thirds vote of the House. The bills are nonamendable in that form. Both bills passed with a majority instead of two-thirds. H.R. 3726 passed 241-173 and H.R. 3538, which was the version identical to H.R. 4474, passed by 225-191. So since they both passed by majorities but not two-thirds, they came before us in the Rules Committee. And we would have loved ideas. My colleague, Mr. Sessions, talked about how can we work better together. Well, there weren't any amendments that were submitted. This would have been the time, whether the ideas came from Republicans or Democrats, and our Rules Committee has an excellent record of allowing amendments from Members in the minority party as well as the majority party. And I know we take our role very conscientiously in terms of making sure that both parties are represented. There simply weren't any better ideas represented. The fact is that both of these bills deal with important local issues. They have important buy-in from the stakeholders.”