Political Quotes

“the first thing I would say, in response to Senator Boxer's eloquent faith-based conclusion, is: Amen, Sister. Secondly, in this last 2 or 3 hours that we have begun this very important debate you can see the different arguments forming. There are serious arguments. They are important arguments. So I appeal to our colleagues on both sides of this issue, regardless of whether you have decided to support the bill, vote for cloture on the motion to proceed so we can finally have the kind of debate from which we will all learn and from which the American people will take some encouragement that we are dealing with this problem. It is obvious that one of the main arguments, perhaps the main one, will be its cost. This is an important issue which we want to discuss. The part that I respectfully take issue with is those who call this a tax increase. It is not a tax increase. Senator Warner and I had some choices to make. One was to do nothing. We rejected that. I suppose if you still feel we should do nothing, that, of course, you will want to come out and argue for that. But we decided we had to do something. We had three choices. One was a carbon tax. We rejected that. One, because we do not think it is viable here. Two, it does not guarantee that you are going to reduce carbon emissions. Second, we had an old-fashioned command-and-control option; mandate that this happens, control everything. We rejected that as well because it is inflexible.”