Political Quotes

“Mr. President, let me just make clear what happened over the course of the last couple of days, because I heard many of my colleagues come down to the floor today and claim that this is a bipartisan bill that is on the floor of the U.S. Senate today, which would strike a lot of Americans as curious because the votes are not bipartisan, so how could that be? How could it be a bipartisan process, as has been claimed by my Republican colleagues, yet there is not bipartisan agreement? Well, let's start from the beginning. Instead of deciding to write this legislation from the beginning, with Republicans and Democrats in the room, the leader decided to write the bill initially, bringing together a consensus of Republican Senators and then bringing Democrats to the table. And there was a period of time--for about 24 hours--in which Democrats were in the room, and we were making progress, and that was a great 24 hours. And then, on Saturday night, all of a sudden, Democrats were let out of the room. And on Sunday morning, lobbyists on K Street sent a draft of legislation to chiefs of staff here that Democrats had no part in writing. So you can't call it a bipartisan piece of legislation if Democrats weren't involved in the beginning, and then they were let out of the room at the end. We appreciate having some input in the middle, but we clearly ended up with a product that doesn't have bipartisan buy-in, and much of that is because of the process that led us here.…”