Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House. And in the aftermath of the summit yesterday, the February 25th health care summit that took place, and over the 7-plus hours from gavel in to gavel out, the 6\1/2\ or so hours of actual dialogue that took place, I think a lot of the American people were watching. And I'd like to think also that a lot of the American people were busy at work and didn't have the opportunity to sit and watch it all in a transfixed, focused fashion, like a lot of us tried to do, and some of us actually succeeded, although I was not among them. I watched as much as I could and I had the closed caption crawler going underneath the screen while I was conducting meetings. So I tried to pay attention to the flow and look back on what happened. I listened to the dialog in here a little bit earlier with the majority leader on the Democrat side and the Whip on the Republican side going through their end-of-the-week colloquy that gives us a sense of where we're going next week and a little bit of a feel for how we work together with each other. In fact, some of those negotiations are taking place here in front of the American people in an open fashion, as we would like to think that most of our negotiations and deliberations are. I would go back through some of that discussion to put a bit of a different perspective on the situation of reconciliation, which is the nuclear option.…”