Political Quotes

“It will shock and surprise you to know, I say to Senator Whitehouse, that it appears to be the latter. We had one of our colleagues come down to the floor and suggest there is a way out of this; that we could come together and work on a compromise. I think all of us--Senator Booker, Senator Blumenthal, and I--were happy to take them up on that effort. I have noted that we have had 6 months since the failure of the last measure to prevent terrorists or suspected terrorists from buying weapons to work on this. No one in the Republican caucus has approached us about trying to find common ground. It wasn't until we took the floor this morning and shut down the process on this appropriations bill that we started to see movement on the Republican side about coming up with an alternative. Now, they did pose an alternative back in December, but it was a miserable alternative that would require law enforcement to go to court in order to stop someone on the list from getting a weapon and capped them at 72 hours to complete that whole process. It was ridiculous and ludicrous. They are probably going to present another alternative. It is important to note that none of that happened until we took the floor, and we have had 6 months since the last vote, and, frankly, 3 days since the shooting in which we could have been trying to work that out.”