Political Quotes

“See, Mr. President, this is the problem we have all the time. The Chairman, Senator Harkin, said Senator Chambliss and he had agreed to have less than 40 amendments. I said, fine. But it is always this rope-a-dope--no, it is not 40; we are still working on it. Of the 287, half of those are gone. And I guess half of that would be 143. We are down on the Republican side. Maybe they can get rid of two-thirds of them. There is always some reason we cannot go to the bill. It is very easy to say if we had had an open process, we could have been to conference. That is foolishness. I repeat, we know what farm bills are. It takes a while to work through them. But in recent history, we have averaged one nonrelevant amendment per farm bill. I am willing to take nonrelevant amendments, but no one will tell us what they will agree to. I agreed to 10, 5, and then Senator Harkin said we can have 40. I said sign them up, let's do 40. The ranking member of the committee says: Well, we are still working on it. That is what we have had. I want all ranching and farming families to hear what is going on here, which has gone on for weeks. Whether the purpose is to stop Democrats from passing a farm bill, I don't know. Maybe the ranking member simply doesn't want a bill. There may be reasons for that. We had a bipartisan bill. Twenty percent of the Senate voted on the bill. Twenty-one Members of the Senate are members of the Agriculture Committee, and they voted to report the bill out here.”