Political Quotes

“the Republican leader has asked a few questions, so I will proceed to answer. I can remember reading with great interest George Orwell's ``1984'' book where, as you know, it came out that up was down and down was up. The Republican leader is living in a fantasy world if he believes what he said, and I assume he does. That is why two scholars, Mann and Ornstein, a couple months ago wrote a book. They have been watching Washington for three or four decades, and they said they have over the years been like a lot of people who are writers--Democrats did this, Republicans did this--but their conclusion was that what has happened in recent years is the Republicans have stopped this body from working by all of their shenanigans on these motions to proceed, creating 60 votes where it never existed before. Robert Caro, who is writing the definitive work on Lyndon Johnson, one of my predecessors, said that I had a very difficult job based on how the Senate has changed with what the Republicans are doing. Now, we have tried mightily. We have gotten a few things done. Whenever there is a decision made that they want to help a bill get passed, we get it done--for example, the highway bill. That bill took so long to get done. We had one major piece of legislation that we waited 4 weeks before they could get it out of their system that instead of doing highways, we should be doing birth control, determining what birth control women should be entitled to.…”