Political Quotes

“Mr. President, here is what is happening. Last night, Senate Democrats asked to do a 1-day continuing resolution. They also asked to do a 3-day continuing resolution. What does that mean? That means we were at an impasse because the House- passed continuing resolution was 4 weeks, and that was not acceptable to enough U.S. Senators to pass. If you subject it to a vote, and it doesn't get cloture, it fails. Under normal circumstances, then you try to find out what might be able to get cloture, but we were so close to the deadline that we needed something called a unanimous consent request. In other words, we needed every single U.S. Senator to accede to the idea that we should vote on something. It is not unusual for a unanimous consent request to be granted. A lot of times it is just perfunctory stuff, everyday stuff to kind of move something in a schedule, allow someone to have 10 more minutes to speak, or whatever it may be, but on big things, you don't always grant consent. I get that. Think about where we were. We were on the precipice of the government shutdown, and Senator Nelson from Florida asked for unanimous consent-- in other words, all 100 U.S. Senators agreeing--to bring up a measure that would have kept the government open; the idea being that is better than a shutdown; the idea being that everybody on the Senate floor was actually behaving like a Senator last night who did not want to shut down the government.…”