Political Quotes

“Today's vote, obviously, we had two very substantive pieces of legislation, one of which is going now to the President, and the other of which--the Violence Against Women Act--had a signature bipartisan vote, as the gentleman knows, passed the House. We have done the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which had been pending for some period of time in making that a permanent piece of legislation. We made sure that women--in 1963, we passed the Equal Pay Act. John Kennedy signed it. Unfortunately, we are still struggling to make sure that that promise is realized and that women are, in fact, paid based upon what they do, not based upon what their gender is. So I would say to my friend, we have passed a lot of legislation we had pending, and we are doing a lot of hearings. We are dealing with infrastructure. We are dealing with drug prices. We made it a big issue in the campaign. We are moving ahead to make sure the Affordable Care Act works in a way that it was designed to work. So I would say to my friend that we have pursued, both on the floor and in committee, the substantive legislation that we have talked to the American people about. I also feel very strongly that we want to avoid what happened to us at the end of the last Congress, when you were in the majority. We shut down the government. I am going to be working hard, hopefully on both sides of the aisle. I don't think anybody wants to see that as an objective, so I am hopeful that we can work together.…”