Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to take this opportunity before we start the final process to thank the vice chairman. She has been incredibly willing to participate, even when we started in a different place than where we ended. She brought to the table a tremendous amount of experience on this issue because of the number of years she had worked on it. She was very accommodating on areas that I felt were important for us to either incorporate or at least debate. What I really want to share with my colleagues is that we had a wholesome debate in the committee. The debate the vice chair and I and our staffs had was wholesome before it even came to the Presiding Officer or to Senator Wyden. That is good. It is why some of the Members might have said in committee: Gee, this looks like a good amendment. Yet it did not fit within the framework of what the vice chair and I sat down and agreed to. So this has been a process over a lot of months of building support, not just within this institution but across the country. It is not a process where I expected to get to the end and for there to be nothing but endorsements of the legislation. I have never seen a piece of legislation achieve that coming out of the Senate. But I think the vice chair and I believed when we actually put legislation together that we were on the same page. The fact is, it is important that today we are again still on the same page, that we have stuck there. I thank the vice chairman.…”