Political Quotes

“I rise today to support Dr. Rice's nomination to be Secretary of State. I don't do it as fulsomely as I rose to support the nomination of the previous Secretary of State. I will explain why. I believe the President of the United States is entitled to his Cabinet unless the person he selects is so far out of the mainstream, incompetent, clearly of questionable character, or, as some in the past have been, dedicated to the express purpose of dismantling the very agency to which they were being assigned, such as President Reagan--as my mother would say, God love him--who wanted to do away with the Department of Education and assigned two people to be the head of the Department of Education for the express purpose of eliminating an agency that I thought needed to remain, or in the special case when the office calls for an unusually different relation, as the Attorney General does. The Attorney General does not work for the President. He is the people's lawyer. He is hired by the President, but he or she is the people's lawyer and, in the worst of all cases, sometimes required to investigate the President himself and in the best of cases is required to interpret the constitutional laws of the land. I very reluctantly voted against Attorney General Gonzales's nomination to be Attorney General because I believe he has so wrongly interpreted law on torture and did such great damage as a consequence of that decision. There were significant consequences.…”