Political Quotes

“Madam President, what you just witnessed here is, we hope, a new day in the U.S. Senate. You see, we have the responsibility of appropriating the money for the Federal Government. We do it in 12 different bills. The total cost to the taxpayers for the resources for the government come to the neighborhood of $1 trillion, so it is a big undertaking. For 5 years, we failed to pass those 12 bills individually. We passed them in a group known as an omnibus. It is usually done either at the end of the fiscal year, which ends September 30, or a few weeks or months thereafter. So this year, we decided in the Senate to try to do it differently, do it better. What we have done through the Appropriations Committee, which I serve on, is to take up each individual bill of the 12 bills. We are trying to pass them on a bipartisan basis because this body is divided, 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans. We picked two of the best legislators in the Senate to accomplish this--Senator Patty Murray, who just spoke, from the State of Washington, a Democrat, and Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, from Maine. The two of them did miracle work in the committee; they got all 12 bills individually passed. We are in the process of trying to consider three of those bills at a time--three of those bills now. That is what we were embarking on last week. In order for us to take up these bills, we needed to suspend the rules of the Senate because of the procedure that we face.…”