Political Quotes

“I rise to thank my friend from Oklahoma for coming to the floor and introducing these three amendments. It begins the process of considering the legislation. I wish to go back to the first point he made, which I think is an important point--that we have to do a lot more than deal with the concern that Members of Congress and our staffs are not covered by insider trading laws to restore the confidence of the American people in this institution. It has taken a long time to get us as low as we are in public esteem today, and it is going to take a long time, I am afraid, to get back to it. The first thing we can do is begin to work more across party lines to be less partisan, to be less ideologically rigid. This institution represents people across the widest array of origins, of ideologies, of political policy beliefs, et cetera. We can't function without compromise. When I say ``compromise,'' I don't mean a compromise of principle, I mean compromise in the sense that one can rarely in a democratic institution of this kind--small ``d''--get everything one aspires to get on a particular piece of legislation. If a person gets half of what they are aspiring to or even more, hopefully, that is a good result. It reminds me of what my dad used to say about marriage, which was that in a successful marriage a spouse felt they were giving in 70 percent of the time to the other spouse, and maybe that is a good guideline for a successful Congress.…”