Political Quotes

“Well, Madam President, I appreciate the Senator's kind words. I am going to kind of use some words that I think he spoke to me last year, and I would not say they are an absolute quote, but it went something like this: Chuck--that is my first name. This was in private. You do not call us by our first name on the floor of the Senate. But something like this was said to me: Chuck, hold off on this. We will do this on the farm bill in 2007. Well, we did do the farm bill in 2007, but we do not have it done yet. Anyway: Chuck, hold off on this. We will do this on the farm bill in 2007. You know you have the votes there. So I backed off and I waited, as has been verified by the chairman of the committee. Everyone knows what happened. His colleague, Senator Dorgan of North Dakota, and I worked hard over a period of a couple years to be able to offer an amendment of a $250,000 hard cap to the commodity programs on the Senate floor to the farm bill. Do you know what. We had a majority. We had 56 Senators who voted to support this hard cap. I can tell by looking at some other Senators here, we probably had 58, but there were reasons otherwise for voting. But leadership--and all I can say is in a generic way--leadership imposed a supermajority requirement on the amendment. We did not have 60 votes. So if you do not have 60 votes around here, sometimes you do not get anything done. At this point there is no guarantee we are even going to have a farm bill.”