Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from Minnesota, and I especially thank my colleague from Maryland. The Senator from Maryland has been working on this issue for a long time. Ben, thank you for your leadership, I thank Lisa Murkowski for making it a bipartisan effort. I have a good speech here, but I want to tell you a story. The story goes back to my graduation from law school and the first job I ever had. I was working for the Lieutenant Governor of the State of Illinois--a man named Paul Simon, who went on to be elected to Congress and to the U.S. Senate. Simon, as the Lieutenant Governor of Illinois, presided over the Illinois State Senate. We had met one another. He said he was going to offer me a job when I graduated from law school, and lo and behold, I became parliamentarian of the Illinois State Senate. I was fresh out of law school. I skipped my graduation ceremony because I desperately needed some money to pay off some bills. I started working in Springfield, IL, as the parliamentarian of the State senate. Simon mistakenly believed that there was a course in law school called parliamentary law. There wasn't. I had to learn it by just reading the rule book over and over again until it became familiar, but eventually I was pretty good at it. I needed to be because we had a big debate going on in Springfield, IL, in the early 1970s about something called the Equal Rights Amendment.…”