Political Quotes

“When I was a professor teaching American Government before I was elected to Congress, the first thing I would do when beginning to teach a class about Congress and the legislative process would be to show this video. It is the 3-minute ``Schoolhouse Rock'' cartoon video from the 1970s called ``I'm Just a Bill.'' The cartoon begins with a group of constituents calling their Congressman with an idea for a new law. The Congressman introduces a bill, which goes through House committee debate and amendment before a vote to report the bill favorably to the House floor. On the floor, the bill goes through debate and amendment before a majority vote that sends the bill over to the Senate, where the process continues. This is a process that we call regular order. Regular order in the House is a standard way of legislating that facilitates extensive participation of Members in the deliberative, consensus-based decisionmaking process. More importantly, this is how the Framers of the Constitution not only intended the House to work, but believed that the House needed to work if the United States, then in its infancy, was to succeed. Congress was created in Article I of the Constitution because the legislative branch, being closest to the people, was necessarily the linchpin of American representative democracy.…”