Political Quotes

“In looking at this, I do not see anything in the proposals, and I think we, in working on this together, tried to bring a discipline to it that said we want to preserve the best traditions of the Senate, we want the minority to be heard, we want the minority to have amendments, and we want them included in the process. What we don't want is the tyranny of the minority. And the Founders talked about the tyranny of the minority. They talked about the fact that if you allowed a small minority to govern and block the governing of the majority, that was the tyranny of the minority, and they feared that. So I think that when we consider this and we talk about the filibuster and our institution today, our Senate, where many times the Republican leader has come to the floor and said that it is going to take 60 votes, everything takes 60 votes, that isn't the way the Founders designed it. The Founders actually had very strong language for what they thought of supermajorities. Everybody remembers their history. The Founders came off the Articles of Confederation. It was a supermajority. It didn't work. It was broken. So they only put into the Constitution in five places supermajorities--things such as expelling a Member and ratifying a treaty--but otherwise it was simple majorities. And when the history is going to be written, it is hard to tell how this happened. But to have a leader of the Senate stand and say that everything takes 60 votes-- the Founders never contemplated that.…”