Political Quotes

“We are facing a shutdown of jobs. We will furlough 5,000 people in the agencies that were referred to on February 27 by my friend. The people of this country should understand there are different ways of getting a bill to the President's desk. It is not necessarily with a conference. I have told Senator Inhofe and Senator Frist that does not mean we are not going to go to conference. I say to my friends, anyone within the sound of my voice, if conferees were appointed right now, immediately, the first thing we would do is say: OK, staff, majority staff, minority staff, majority and minority staff from the House, get together and work on this. See what you can come up with. Bring it back to us. That would take a couple of weeks to do that. Then we would work through whatever they couldn't work through themselves. Finally, the Members would agree on certain things. Then if there were things we could not agree on, we would take it to the full conference. We are weeks and weeks away from that if we appoint a conference right now. The point is, we are not appointing conferences right now because, as I said before, we have on many occasions, more than 20 times already in this year's Congress, passed legislation by what we call preconferencing it. It does not matter what you call it. I have the same goal as the Senator from Missouri. We want a highway bill.”