Political Quotes

“yesterday the Senate invoked cloture on the appropriations bill we have been working on for several weeks. Now what we are doing is burning, wasting 30 hours postcloture. During the postcloture time, each Senator has the right to speak for 1 hour. It is obvious there are 100 of us, so we all can't speak. Senators who do not like the bill and want to express their views as to why it is a bad bill, they get 1 hour. This is truly a waste of time. It always is a waste of time, but it is a waste of time now because we have so much important work to do. Next in line is the budget resolution. We have heard speeches over here. Oh, gee, have we heard speeches. We need the Democrats to do a budget. No one mentions, but that is OK--no one mentions we did not have a budget resolution; we had President Obama sign a law that took care of our budget problems. But we want to satisfy the Republicans and we want to get to that budget debate. I talked this morning about what a terrific job Chairman Murray has done on this bill. It has been outstanding. But the budget is here by virtue of a law that was passed. There is 50 hours permitted for debate on the budget. Then we can have a lot of amendments after all debate time is over. Republicans said let's do the budget debate and we say let us do it. Why should we sit around here and look at each other and do nothing?…”