Political Quotes

“This is in the waning hours. This last one, we were literally going out of session. I mean, we could have shut this place down easily and walked away and pretended to have a clear conscience and said: We have done the Nation's work. To be fair about it, there were three members of our caucus who ripped me a new ear in the caucus for doing this, three of them. Two are gone; one is still around. No, we shouldn't do this. But this is an example of what happens. I have been here since 1972. It started in October of the 1972 election. I wasn't here in the 1972 election. Then in the 1976 election, they started to hold up judges. They started holding up judges somewhere around September. And then it moved; by the 1980 election, they were being held up in July. This year, our Republican friends started 18 months ago to hold these folks up. This is what I am worried is going to happen, and I will end with this. I am worried if we take back this place, we are going to have a lot of new women and men in this place say: Hey, the Republicans did that. Mark my words. You will have a bunch of Democratic Senators who have no institutional memory out here--if we have a Republican President and a Democratic Senate--holding up Republican judges a year out. This is bad, bad, bad precedent. This is not a good thing to do.”