Political Quotes

“following my remarks and those of the Republican leader, the Senate will be in a period of morning business until 11 a.m. this morning, with the time equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees. At 11 a.m. the Senate will proceed to executive session, and we will have five rollcall votes which will be to confirm three judges from Florida, one from Vermont, and also a very important cloture vote on the Rodriguez nomination, to be the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security. Nominations Mr. President, it is unfortunate that we still have scores and scores of good men and women on the Executive Calendar waiting to be confirmed. The delay by the Republicans is untoward. It has never happened before, and we are working through these as quickly as we can. The judges only take an hour of postcloture time, but the nominations take 8 hours of postcloture time. We can yield back 4 hours, which we do almost every time, but these stalling tactics by the Republicans have added to our doing nothing here in the Senate not by hours or days or weeks but by months. It is so unfortunate. We have never had a situation such as this before. As everyone knows, we changed the rules as they related to judges, and thank goodness we did that. Justice can move forward in our country without the delay and obstruction that has taken place over the last number of years with Republicans holding up judges.…”