Political Quotes

“I am prepared to close, and I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, it pleases me to see you in the chair. It has been a Northwestern day so far, but the State of Washington has a proud tradition on the Rules Committee. A lot of folks don't understand what the Rules Committee does up there. If you look over here on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, it looks like a representative sample of most of the Congress, but, really, it is a lot of folks with some Rules Committee passion. You can't get to the House floor without going through the Rules Committee. As I think back on folks who have served, I certainly think about Doc Hastings as being in that category that labored on the Rules Committee year after year. Mr. Newhouse labored on the Rules Committee, and I appreciate him being down here to bring us to a close. It is important what we do on the Rules Committee. We bring two kinds of bills to this floor, Mr. Speaker. We bring things that are worked through the process. They are collaborative; they are agreeable. We get everybody on board, and we bring those under the suspension calendar. That is that calendar for things that we have already sorted out. Then there are those bills that we hadn't quite sorted out, those things that might be a little controversial. In fact, when we bring a rule to the floor, almost every rule vote is an entirely partisan vote because of disagreements about the way the underlying process was structured.…”