Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives this evening, as we move toward a September session that perhaps gets concluded in a way that we go back to the November elections and, hopefully, we are bridged over any great big decisions that might come in a lameduck session. Something that I wanted to address to you, Mr. Speaker, is the circumstances of lameduck sessions. I look back on the history of them and it is hard for me to find happy conclusions that are drawn during lameduck sessions. I recall that Thomas Jefferson once made the statement that ``large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities.'' What he meant by that was, if you have a large initiative and it is going to move this country and it is going to stress a lot of people in this country, then, if you move that large initiative and its margins are essentially close to a jump ball, you are going to have almost half the people unhappy--maybe more than half the people who are unhappy. So that large initiative should not be advanced on a slender majority, because you get so much pushback, you don't get public buy- in. If you have a large initiative, you need to have a public that embraces it; one that, hopefully, we can get to a supermajority on large initiatives, because then we go forward in lockstep in defending and promoting those decisions that were made by this country.…”