Political Quotes

“I am very privileged to be a cosponsor with the Senator from Iowa of this amendment, and I congratulate him on his willingness to charge the fortress here, to try to remove one of the hurdles to this being a truly representative and productive body. The filibuster may have made some sense at one point; it may have been a reasonable idea, but it in fact has been badly misused in our time. You can pick your favorite statistic, but the one that I saw a while ago was that there were more filibusters in the last session of the Senate than in the first 108 years combined. Others will tell you there have been more since 1990 than the preceding 140 years combined. Whatever the years, it is pretty obvious we have come to a point in the history of this Chamber where the filibuster, the ability of one Member to stand up and stop the body from functioning effectively and to block the will of the majority, is a contributor to gridlock and to our inability to produce and, therefore, to public frustration which is in the air and we are attempting as best we can to respond to them.”