Political Quotes

“we are hearing this argument, let's just fix it in conference. Well, the last patent reform bill that passed, H.R. 1561, passed the House on March 3 of 2004. The Senate Judiciary Committee passed their bill, but it never saw action before the full Senate. The bill that the House passed never made it to conference, but it became law because someone stuffed it into the giant multi-thousand page omnibus consolidated appropriations bill which became law. And besides that, we are Members of Congress. For us to stand up here and say, well, this is too confusing for us to understand, excuse me; that's what we're paid for. And if we have to take a considerable period of our time to study and learn patent law, that's our job. If we don't do that, we are failing in our obligation to the people that we represent. So, what happened last time was good for making sausage. You stuffed the House-passed bill which never passed the Senate, never made it into conference, into a giant omnibus bill, but that's not how you make legislation. Now, look what's going on here. We were told that we had to file by 5 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon any amendments to this bill. I went to the Rules Committee at 3 p.m. yesterday, where we met on the bill. At 2:43 p.m., the first manager's amendment was filed, 18 pages long. While we were still discussing the first manager's amendment, the second manager's amendment got filed at 3:50 p.m.…”