Political Quotes

“in the Senate we work on an adversarial basis lots of times because that is the way the Founding Fathers set up our country. I am not going to give a long lecture on this because I know people have a lot to do. This little Constitution was very hard to come by. It was very hard to come by. We tried the Articles of Confederation. They did not work at all. We had the State of Rhode Island, a little, tiny place, with not many people in it; we had the big State of New York, with lots of territory and lots of people. How were they going to work that out? They could not--until a man from Connecticut, Elbridge Gerry, came as one of the delegates, in June of 1787, to Philadelphia, who said: I have a great idea. It was an idea that had never been tried before. It was a stunningly interesting idea that he had. He suggested to the Founding Fathers a bicameral legislature, having a legislature made up of two bodies, two legislative bodies, the House and the Senate. That is the reason we are able to have a constitution. But in the process, built into our Constitution is constant vying for power. You have the executive branch, the judicial branch, but within the legislative branch, there is constant vying for power between the House and the Senate. That is the case, even though both bodies may be of one party. When Pelosi was the Speaker, the Speaker and I were very good friends, but we had problems trying to work out things between the two bodies.…”