Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. More than that, I thank her for the thousands of hours that she has put in over the years in trying to address in a positive, constructive way our broken immigration system and for her leadership in forging a bill that is a step--just a step. I want to thank Mr. Nadler, the chairman of the committee, for ensuring that this bill came forward. Mr. Speaker, I have been sitting here for a few minutes, and I have heard a number of my Republican colleagues bemoaning the fact that we could have done this in a bipartisan fashion and come with up with a much better bill. Many of those folks who said that have been serving here over the last 8 years in the majority, and we have been pleading with them over those 8 years: Bring us a bill, a bipartisan bill. Mr. Speaker, as you so well know, you and Mr. Hurd, a Republican from Texas, worked tirelessly in fashioning a bipartisan bill, and the Republicans refused to bring it to the floor; although, in my view it had a majority of votes on this floor. Indeed, it was about to be petitioned out of the committee and brought to the floor in a process that you can do that without the committee's voting for it. Just short of the 218 votes necessary to do that, the Republican leadership put all sorts of pressure to assure that that bill was not discharged from the committee. So spare me the crocodile tears about a bipartisan bill. We tried to do a bipartisan bill.…”