Political Quotes

“I was presiding on Tuesday. Sometimes my staff will give me a folder of things to review while I am presiding, and often they will be upset when I come back having not reviewed what they have given me. The reason for that is simple: When there are Members speaking before the body, I am, frankly, very interested to listen and to hear what our colleagues have to say. We don't do enough of that in this place. We are so busy during the day, we don't spend a lot of time on the Senate floor. We might have the floor on on our TV in our office, but we are not always paying attention to what our colleagues have to say. One of the benefits of being able to preside is that you do get to listen to the arguments that are being made right here on the floor. In the hour or so that I was presiding on Tuesday, I got to hear about four or five of my Republican colleagues come down in sequence to make their case as to why they would be voting against the American Rescue Plan, and so I got to hear a number of themes being developed. I don't think coincidentally a number of arguments were made repeatedly by many of our friends on the Republican side of the aisle, and so I decided it might be worthwhile to just spend a few minutes talking about the claims that are made about this bill by Republicans, the reasons why they are voting against it, and to talk about how some of these arguments may be a little bit more disingenuous than we might like.…”