Political Quotes

“I couldn't agree with Chairman Inhofe more. I know he knew Senator Lautenberg very well and worked with him on the committee and off the committee on a variety of issues. He was very committed to his grandchildren. As Senator Inhofe knows, many times we would see him in committee, and when he would talk specifically about the bills before us, he would say: Is this going to help my children and their children? One of the things he talked about on this bill was that this would save more lives and help his grandchildren's generation more than any bill he ever worked on. So he was very proud of this bill, and we were very sorry to lose him. But the thing I want to say about Chairman Inhofe is that as a dedicated and determined legislator, he saw the opportunity. Senator Vitter and I had worked on this. We came to Senator Inhofe at the beginning of the Congress and said: We have a good bipartisan piece of legislation we have worked on for a while. But you took the bull by the horns. You ended up helping us improve it. I think when we started in the committee--when you marked it up earlier in the year in the Environment and Public Works Committee, we had maybe one or two Democrats supporting it. We expanded that, and it passed out with a 15- to-5 vote, so a very significant vote in terms of holding people together.…”