On the recordMarch 3, 2010
Well, you know, I hate to admit how many years I've served in the legislative body. I started by saying I've served in the majority, in the minority and now in the wilderness. As to most legislation I've seen that works pretty well, surprisingly enough, people are sold on it. There is a process of a bunch of people coming together, defining a problem, working on a solution. Frequently when they start, the bills are pretty rough, are pretty hard to understand, and have a lot of questions and problems in them; but as more and more people have a chance to work on them, to roll their sleeves up and have input in them, the bills get refined. In the business world, if you want to mess something up, you send it to a committee. In the political world, when committees work on legislation, they tend to refine the product. After a period of time, what happens is you have certain ideas that some people just can't tolerate, and you tend to throw the radical stuff out. What you can agree to comes together. When that happens and particularly when it happens across party lines, you don't have major fundamental reform, but you change, and you fix things in ways that solve people's problems. What happened this year is we had 80 less seats than the Democrats, so they thought, We don't need the Republicans. The dickens with the Republicans. We've got such a majority that we can do whatever we want.
