Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator for raising the issue. Let me tell people what happens all too frequently in this body. The President will nominate a person to be at a Cabinet-level or sub-Cabinet-level position that requires confirmation of the Senate. Individual Senators say: I have a problem. Maybe it is the person in the health department. I have some problems in the health department that I would like to see paid attention to. It has nothing at all to do with the nominee. In fact, getting a confirmed person in that position would be very important to getting those issues resolved. The Senator uses what is known as the courtesy of a hold to hold up that position in order to try to get changes made in that agency. That may take a week. That may take a month. That may never be resolved. In the meantime, we are not acting on many of the positions that require confirmation from the Senate. I think we are down to about 500 positions now that require Senate confirmation. We streamlined that in the last Congress. We eliminated some that required the confirmation of the Senate. That was a good change we made 2 years ago. That worked. We now have somewhere around I think 500 or 600 positions that require Senate confirmation. Let me give a little arithmetic here. If the majority leader has to bring a cloture motion in order to break an individual hold of a Senator on those 500 nominees, the Senate will do nothing but nominations.…”