Political Quotes

“I appreciate very much the minority allowing us to move to this bill, this most important bill, dealing with court security. But here we go again; nothing happening on it. I am willing to have Democrats and Republicans debate these amendments. There have been some that have been filed but not offered. I just left a meeting in my office with the head of the U.S. Marshals Service. His name is John Clark. He indicated to me, among other things, that this year there has been a 17-percent increase in the threats against our Federal judges, Supreme Court Justices, and all our other Federal judges; about 11,000, I think that is what he told me. I may have that number a little bit wrong; I just left him a minute ago. This is important legislation. It allows our Federal judges not to have to list the names of their children, where they live, where the individual judge lives. We had in Illinois a terrible situation where one of these disgruntled defendants in a criminal case went to some judge's home and waited for the family to come home and killed them. We need to move this bill. I don't want a hue and cry from the minority that we are not allowing amendments; we want amendments. If people want to amend this bill, let them do it. But I am going to file cloture on this bill tonight for a Friday cloture vote. We have got to complete legislation around here. We cannot come here each day and sit around looking at each other. We should be doing some legislating.”