Political Quotes

“first I want to express my agreement with the gentleman from California on the importance of putting back in here important international financial material. But secondly, I want to congratulate the gentleman from Ohio for his work on the census and say that I plan to vote for this bill. I try very hard to avoid cliches, but it is much too late in the session to think fresh, so I am going to have to use one. I think some of my good friends here are trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The problem I and others had with the original census language was that it said we could not go forward with the sampling process until the Supreme Court had said it was okay. That would have killed it. That is not in the bill. We now have parallel processes. We have the sampling going forward, and we have the court process. I disagree with my friends who say, oh, allowing the court process to go forward kills sampling. I think sampling is constitutional. I do not think the Supreme Court is going to find it unconstitutional. Indeed, I am sceptical that the Supreme Court, given its own rules on ripeness and standing, will even decide this at all. So what we have is a situation where previously sampling could not go forward until the Supreme Court acted, and we knew the Supreme Court was not going to be able to act because of its own doctrines, and now we have a situation where it can go forward.”