Political Quotes

“Senators Dodd and Shelby are crafting a bill that can go directly to the President. That is what we are trying to do, craft something on which there has been general agreement with the counterparts of Shelby and Dodd in the House, and it would go immediately to the President. As you know, they can do things very quickly in the House that we cannot do here. That is the goal with housing. We are going to get there eventually. The problem is the way this is sent to us from the House, the format in which it was sent to us, we are now under cloture. That cloture will run out at approximately 5:45 tomorrow evening. At that time there are two germane amendments that we know of. There are a couple more that are arguably germane. We will see what is the will of the body. It is my understanding that on those two that are arguably germane, the managers of the bill have worked something out. If there would be no objection, they would accept those. The problem is on the amendments they have worked on up to this time, there has been an objection and we cannot proceed on any of those amendments that Dodd and Shelby have worked out. Automatically, after the 30 hours is up, we would vote on the germane amendments. No one can stop us from adopting or rejecting those amendments. If we cannot get permission from everyone here as of now--I know of only one holdup on our being able to complete the housing legislation.”