Political Quotes

“I have heard a good part of the afternoon: Why can't we stay and debate this, and so on? I don't minimize the seriousness of the issues, whether they are about arming Syrian rebels, the potential for new kinds of military action, certainly the ongoing saga in Ukraine or also what is going on in our own country. Students are not being able to afford college, families are not being able to afford to buy a home, and work is not worth it because wages are frozen. We are pushing people to a standard of living less than what they had. The people of the middle class are fighting hand-to-hand to stay middle class. Those who might want to get there are seeing the opportunity ladder sawed down. When we wanted to bring bills to the floor in a regular order and bring up regular appropriations that had both money and policy where people could have debated them in an orderly way, we had cluster bombs of parliamentary procedure thrown on where people hid behind votes on motions to proceed. Some of the biggest critics today saying, why don't we stay here and debate, have been some of the biggest obstacles in insisting on bringing bills up in regular order. So here we are today in the closing hours of the CR. We have had much enlightened conversation that was actually to hear leaders talk about this and differences of opinions in the most civil way, with intellectual rigor and firmness of conviction. That is what we should be doing. I would like to do more of it.…”