Political Quotes

“Mr. President, following any leader remarks, the Senate will proceed to a period of morning business until 11 a.m., with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each. The Republicans will control the first half, and the majority will control the final half. At 11 a.m., the Senate will resume consideration of S. 23, the America Invents Act. I would hope if people have amendments they want to offer to this legislation they would do so. I would hope they would be germane, but there are no restrictions. People can offer whatever amendments they want on this matter. But I would hope we can do that. Patent Reform We had an important amendment offered by Senator Feinstein yesterday. It is an extremely important measure. I am supportive of that. It is an issue where I think we should not try to fix something in that area of patent reform that is not broken. But the patent reform bill is important. We have 750,000 patents that have been applied for, and there has been no response from the Patent Office. One of the big issues we had was how we are going to pay for this, the work they have to do. We had a novel idea. Senator Coburn, it is my understanding, came up with the idea first: have the Patent Office pay for it with the applications people file. That money would go to the Patent Office to get rid of that backlog. In the past, as I understand it, those moneys have gone to the general fund. So that issue was going to be a big debatable issue on this bill.…”