Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for his observation. The truth in legislating is that we are not legislating. We are putting forth the positions of your party in this House, not shared by the Senate, not shared by the President of the United States, also elected by the people of the United States; and absent agreement by those two entities, coequal branches of the Congress and a coequal branch of the government, the executive, absent their agreeing with your party's perspective, we're not legislating. That's the problem, Mr. Leader. And again, I express to you, you said--and I don't have the words in front of me exactly, but we can pull them out. But I am perplexed because you said, when we passed the farm bill without the nutrition program in it--which had been done for a half a century. They had been paired by Republican Congresses and Democratic Congresses, signed by Republican Presidents and Democratic Presidents. It's only this last 2 years that we have been unable to come to grips with bipartisan agreement on the farm bill. It's only in the past 2 years that we've been unable to get a bill that was bipartisan in fashion to the floor and, ultimately, voted on final passage. The bipartisan bills that came out of committee both in the last Congress and this Congress were turned into--the first one, of course, in the last Congress didn't come to the floor, as the gentleman knows.…”