Political Quotes

“I thank my chairman for yielding the time, and I want to thank my chairman for his work on opening this process up in the House. He's teamed up with our new Speaker to say that regular order is the better way to do things. I want to say, and it needs to be said, it's too easy when all you do is read the headlines in this town to start pointing the finger of blame. Here is National Journal, one of our dailies: Dems Sign Conference Report. The White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had blocked passage of the measure. It's not about where the blame is; it's about where the successes are. When you look behind me, Mr. Speaker, at this stack of pages that represents this bill, what that represents is the work that didn't get done last year but that Norm Dicks and that Hal Rogers have come together to get done this year. When we talk about regular order and the regular order that hasn't happened this year, what we need to talk about is the fact that we had no regular order on appropriations bills last year. We got six of them passed through appropriations, the regular order process, this year. That's half. That's 50 percent of the way there, and I know we have a commitment from the Appropriations Committee to get the rest of them there next year. This is a success story. This is not a failure. Is this the way that I wanted to legislate, 2,300 pages? No, it's not.…”