Political Quotes

“I think that would be wrong, but we are not trying to get rid of the filibuster. We are changing a tiny aspect of what goes on around here so that people would have to do a couple of things: One is to not filibuster simply getting on a bill. And also, if they want to filibuster, they would have to stand and talk about it and not be in their office someplace. Senator Durbin just reminded me of one Republican Senator who forced us to be here over the weekend and he then left and went back to a wedding in his State. I repeat for the third time, the only people who think the Senate is working really well right now are the Republican leader and Republican Senators because it is not working well. They have abused the process. They have abused something that was set up to help legislation get passed--the filibuster. They have abused it and now they filibuster on everything. They can talk all they want about filling the amendment tree and all that, but that has no bearing on what is going on around here. We have tried to get things done. The Defense bill is a good example. I said, let's move to the Defense bill and they objected to it. They have been talking about it for months. I agreed to move to it, with no preconditions at all. We have to do other things. We have a very short period of time here now, and everything around here is the bill stall. He talks about getting bills done. In this Congress we have gotten almost nothing done.…”