Political Quotes

“I want to indicate, first and foremost, that I understand what the sponsors of the bill are trying to do. I support the concept of reforming the IDEA law. I do not fault them for trying to make the changes. What I fault is the process in which we bring the bill to the floor with a locked-up agreement. One of the greatest aspects of the U.S. Senate is that we have the opportunity to debate, and hopefully sometimes have a couple of people listen to what we say and influence an outcome. I realize that does not happen very often around here. But in this particular case, we do not have the opportunity to influence the outcome because we are told: A deal has been struck between the House and the Senate, minority and majority, White House and everybody else. It is just one happy old time here, everything is done and we do not need to debate it, we do not need to suggest any changes. Perhaps an analogy might be if we had an agreement to spend $1 billion on cancer research and somebody told us if we spent another $50 million we could cure cancer, I think we would be prepared to amend the bill to add the $50 million to the $1 billion in a hurry. So I do not support this kind of process.”