Political Quotes

“reserving the right to object, and I initially say to my impatient friend, he has to be patient and allow me to say a few words. During the short time we have been in the minority, we have behaved in a way that I think is proper for a responsible minority. For example, on this bill dealing with the authorization of our defense capacity in the United States, we have been very clear how we support the troops. But remember, we have this little difficult issue. The President of the United States has said he is going to veto this bill. So we have worked through all this with that in mind. Having said that, in spite of that, we did not ask for a cloture vote on the motion to proceed. When we were in the majority, having the minority not do that was a big day. It happened extremely rarely. We have been doing that consistently--with some exceptions but not many. On this Defense bill, we have allowed amendments to become pending. There are a dozen or so pending right now. We have allowed the Senate to conduct votes. We have allowed managers' amendments to be cleared-- lots of them. We have reacted in a responsible way. We have no regret for having done that. The two managers were working together to get amendments pending in a mutually agreed-upon fashion when out of the blue, up comes this cyber security amendment. It was also done in a very unusual way where Senator Burr employed parliamentary devices to get the cyber security bill pending to where we are right now.…”