Political Quotes

“I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this bill. I thank my colleague Senator Udall, of New Mexico, and my colleague Senator Merkley, of Oregon, for their extraordinary work. I don't know if they have ever had the experience that I have often had or the Presiding Officer has had, but there are times, in my having spent a week here after having done absolutely nothing, when I am walking through the Denver International Airport, and I want to put a paper bag over my head because I am so embarrassed about the failure of this institution to live up to even the barest responsibilities that we have. I mean, we can't even pass a basic infrastructure bill around this place while China is building 3,500 miles of fiber-optic cable to connect Latin America with Africa and back to China to export the surveillance state from China. That is what China is doing there while we are doing nothing here. We have become the land of flickering lights, whereby the standard of success is whether we have kept the lights on for another 2 hours or another 4 hours. What the American people need to understand is that this is the ideological end state of what the Freedom Caucus came to Washington to do. It has become the ideological end state of what Mitch McConnell can do because, in the rubble of our institutions, they can achieve the objectives they want to achieve. They can put rightwing judges on the courts without our institutions working.…”