Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I see four people in the gallery. I see three Members on the floor. The galleries are empty, the floor is empty because we are not doing anything, and it is not because we don't have a lot of things to do. We have 6--7 if you count tomorrow where we will leave by 12:00--6 full days left in the session in 2013, and yet we fiddle here while the country sees itself burning on bills that are going nowhere, that have no priority and deal with a subject, energy, which, happily, is one of the most successful places we are at in America today, where we are fast becoming the energy-independent, low-cost energy situs of the world. We have no budget conference coming to this floor scheduled in the 6 full days that we have left and the 2 other days that may be counted in which we come in at 6:30 and meet for probably a half an hour or 45 minutes and vote on suspension bills. Yet we have spent this entire week--and we left, of course, hardworking day yesterday, we left doing work at 2:30 in the afternoon. No budget conference, no fiscal policy, no solution to the crisis that confronted us when we shut down government. I urged that we have a budget conference report by November 22--that is tomorrow--so that we didn't, as our practice has been in recent months and years, confront real issues only when crisis gives us no other alternative.…”