Political Quotes

“Mr. President, it has been 3 years--3 years--since my colleague from Kentucky who just spoke announced to America that his highest priority as a Senate leader was to make sure Barack Obama was a one-term President. That was his highest priority. And since that time, we have seen a record number of Republican filibusters on the floor of the Senate. They have broken all records in terms of efforts to stop even to allow a vote on the priorities of the Obama administration. For the Republican leader to then come to the floor and bemoan the fact that the President has not done more suggests he believes we are victims of political amnesia. And we are not. We know the President came with a stimulus bill when we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. That is what we were losing the month the President was sworn in. He came with a stimulus bill to turn the economy around and to give tax breaks to businesses and individuals. And we ended up getting three Republicans who joined us over the objection of their leadership. We needed those three to break the Republican filibuster on the President's effort to get the economy moving forward again. When it came time for health care reform, Senator Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, invited the Republicans to sit down and construct a bipartisan bill with us, and they walked away--they walked away and then started a Republican filibuster against any change in health care reform.…”