Political Quotes

“Mr. President, reserving the right to object--now, for the rest of the story. Last October, President Biden had a major piece of legislation that provided assistance to Ukraine in its battle against Vladimir Putin. It provided assistance to Israel, assistance to Taiwan, and a massive amount of humanitarian aid. It was bipartisan, we thought. Then the Republicans, particularly in the Senate, stepped up and said: We are not going to consider any bill like that unless you attach something to deal with our border, border security. Well, we said: How are we going to achieve that? They gave us a formula that they wanted. They wanted to have their lead negotiator, the Senate Republicans did, one of our colleagues, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. James Lankford is a certified conservative--I am sure he would be happy to be called that--and a person I respect a great deal. He is a man of principle, and he was in charge of negotiating on the Republican side. So they asked us: Whom do you want--the Democrats--to negotiate? We said: Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Kyrsten Sinema, an Independent Democrat from Arizona. The three of them went to work in October of last year, and they worked on this for weeks, months. It went back and forth, and it looked many times like it was hopeless; we couldn't reach an agreement. Lo and behold, they did. They came up with a bill, a bill that massively changed the way we manage the border.…”