Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank the senior Senator from Connecticut for his leadership on this and so many other issues on behalf of the people of his home State. Before I get into prevention as a policy issue, I just want to reiterate a process point. Here we are in the world's greatest deliberative body--the world's greatest deliberative body--and there really are so many talented individuals who come from county counsels, who come from State assemblies, who come from State senates, who come from the U.S. House, and find themselves in the U.S. Senate, the world's greatest deliberative body. And here we are debating one of the biggest public policy issues over the last decade, arguably over the last generation. Here we are. I am thinking about my early days in the Hawaii legislature and what we would do. If we wanted to move a bill along but we weren't sure exactly what to do, we would flaw the effective date because we knew the language didn't work yet, but we wanted to take it to conference committee. We didn't want it to be enacted into law, but we wanted it to move through the process. So what we would do is we would flaw the effective date. We would say ``Effective year 2100,'' so that even if it were accidentally enacted into law, it wouldn't have the force of law. Yet once in a while, a staffer or a member would make a clerical error and actually enact something with a delayed effective date into law, and they were humiliated. This was a mistake.…”