Political Quotes

“Madam President, all I can think of, in listening to the Senator from Maryland, is if we could have limited this legislation before the Senate to the provisions we agreed to on a bipartisan basis--in fact, many of which passed unanimously in the Senate Small Business Committee--clearly, we would be in a far better position than we are today. That is the regrettable dimension to the situation we are facing procedurally in the Senate. I know from the majority side there is not an inclination to accommodate the rights of the minority, but that is the tradition in the Senate. The majority rules, but you accommodate the rights of the minority. That is the essence of what the institution of the Senate is all about. I regret we are where we are today in the Senate on this issue that I have been championing since January of this year. It seems to me we are all worried about the legislative train running out of the station. If we are all concerned about the limited time we have available to address the issues of small business and job creation, which are the foremost issues in the United States of America, I would have suggested--and I did and I asked and I pleaded--that we should have addressed this issue in January, at the outset of the legislative session, not, at the end of July, when we are about to recess for August. So everybody is worried about the recess. We only have 1 week left. Well, that is right. What do we know today that we didn't know earlier?…”