Political Quotes

“in the Chamber this morning we have the chairman of the education committee, a man for whom I have the utmost respect. He is a person who understands education. He was the Governor of the State of Tennessee. He was the Secretary of Education, and he has been an outstanding Senator. But something occurred last night that I think is really outside the specter of reasonableness. Cloture was filed on the education bill last night, meaning we are going to have a vote on it tomorrow morning. We have worked on a few amendments, and basically all of them could have been accepted with voice votes. There was not a single difficult amendment that was brought up. So now cloture is being sought, and in the process, ignoring Democratic amendments that we have been waiting to offer for some time now. We are not going to allow cloture to succeed unless we have a pathway forward on these amendments. The ranking member of the committee, the senior Senator from Washington, knows this. She has talked with the chairman of the committee about this, and we are going to have to have a reasonable time to debate those amendments and have votes on those amendments. Otherwise, we are not going to complete this bill. It is an important bill. We should complete the bill. Senate Democrats have said for months that Republicans are running a sham on the appropriations process. From the very beginning, the Republicans have proceeded with an appropriations process that is designed to fail.…”