Political Quotes

“Madam President, this means Senators will not need to obtain unanimous consent prior to setting aside the pending amendments for amendments to be called up. I would also say--I wanted to hold up saying anything about this until we got this agreement--the work done on this bill by Senators Schumer and Alexander has been work that has been ongoing for years and took their partnership, working together as the two men who run the Rules Committee, to move this forward. It has been very hard to get from here to there. I have every bit of confidence that we are going to move forward and do, for the first time in decades, a streamlining of how Presidential nominations are approved. This is good. This is what we talked about doing at the beginning of this year, and we need to continue doing that. I also express my appreciation to the chairman and ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, Senators Lieberman and Collins, for doing additional hard work in sorting through what the committees should do in approving nominations. They have done a good job because virtually every committee chair says: Are you sure you want to do all these? If we were back where we had been in years past, we would wind up getting nothing done because the chairs simply thought they needed to have a hand in everything that went on with all these nominations. Senators Lieberman and Collins did a good job getting us to this point.…”