Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I have just seen the rarest of occurrences in the so-called debate on these nominees on the floor. We actually had an explanation of the nominee we would be voting on. The fact that the Senate's time is taken in a way that it never has been before to process the President's nominations is outrageous. There is a view that we need more time to think about the nominee. There is plenty of time to do that. It is called the committee process. It is called a vetting process that also may very well take too long now, but there is plenty of time for these circuit court nominees we are voting on this week to be vetted. There is plenty of time to ask them questions. There is plenty of time to look into their backgrounds. The only reason, in my view, that we take the time we are taking to do six votes on six judges in a week--that is six 15-minute votes. If we were efficient enough to do that, it would take an hour and half to vote on these six judges, and the final vote on none of them would be different than taking 5 days. So why do we take 5 days? We take 5 days because that means we can't get to anything else. That means the President's ability to populate the government, as people elected him to do, is diminished. It also eliminates the time we have to do the other work the Senate is designed to do. The Senate is in, as the majority leader likes to describe it, the personnel business, but that is not supposed to be the only business of the Senate.…”