Political Quotes

“I spoke to Josh Bolton earlier today about the appropriations bills. Of course, it would be great if we could have an overall scheme as to how we can complete them. In the meantime, if we can get them done, we should proceed through these bills one at a time and recognize that the power of the White House, whether it is a Democratic President, a Republican President in the appropriations process, comes during the conferences, anyway. The House can move things very quickly. So all these are ready to go to conference. I hope we can move through these individual appropriations bills and hopefully have some recognition of what we are going to try to accomplish in conference before we go to conference and work some of these out. The first test will be this bill we are working on now. There has been some moving on it today. Senator Cochran is the one who suggested to me if there is no progress tomorrow, that we should move to third reading. When I say 'no progress,' people just waiting around, not offering any amendments. So that is where we are. I hope we can finish this soon, do what we need to do on SCHIP, and do the 9/11 conference report, which I understand is almost finished. When I say almost, 100 percent of it needs to be done, and 99 percent of that has been done.”