Political Quotes

“I will respond to my friend from Tennessee who makes cogent arguments, as he always does. He is a good friend of mine, and we have worked together on a lot of things. I hope this is the beginning of some colloquies we can have here. I do want to indulge and let other Senators have their say because they were so kind to let me have my say too. But I intend to be here as long as anybody wants to say anything or to engage in some colloquies here on the Senate floor. I say to my friend from Tennessee, that as I listened to him, and I did very carefully, there are a couple of things I want to point out in terms of this idea of a filibuster and being able to amend things. My friend referred many times to the health care bill. I do not know if my friend said this, but I have heard it said that we wrote it behind closed doors and all of that kind of stuff. Let me point out that when it came to our committee, the HELP Committee, we had 13 days of markup, 54 hours. We allowed any amendment to be offered. The Senator is a member of that committee. We allowed any Senator on our committee to offer any amendment. We adopted 161 Republican amendments, either through some votes, which they won, or through just adopting the amendments. Then after that, after all of that, all Republicans voted no. That is fine. There are a lot of times I know in the past when I have had an amendment on a bill which I thought improved it, but overall I did not like the bill, and I voted against it.…”