Political Quotes

“under cloture, what it means of course is we are doing nothing--good speeches on important topics, but we are not considering legislation. We are not debating a bill. We are killing time, which turns out to be the major occupation of the Senate for the last year and a half. Why? Because the minority party, the Republican Party, has a strategy. It is a strategy of using filibusters to slow down or stop any bill from passing in the Senate. Today we are seeing that strategy in the extreme. The bill pending before the Senate is H.R. 1195. In the annals of legislative history in the Senate, this will not go down as a great piece of legislation. This is not a bill that was worked on for years by Senators and their staffs, conceived with grand ideas to change this great country. This is a bill which by and large changes punctuation in the Federal highway bill, a bill we passed several years ago. Then when we carefully read it afterwards, we said: We got some of this wrong. This should not have been 'trail.' It should have read 'road.' This section you referred to wasn't exactly accurate. It is another section. So we created a technical corrections bill, a bill that cleaned up the Federal highway bill. This technical corrections bill is now being filibustered by the Republican side of the aisle. They want to stop us from voting on a technical corrections bill. They want to delay our consideration of even this housekeeping bill. You ask yourself why.…”