Political Quotes

“first, I thank my colleague and friend and roommate from Illinois--we are going to miss our landlord deeply-- for his articulate enunciation of where we are here. We have always extended unemployment benefits, and we have done it, in most instances, in a bipartisan way and not paid for it. Under George Bush, 2007, unemployment was only 5.6 percent. Now it hovers around 7 percent. He moved it forward. It had bipartisan support. Things have evolved. I guess we do not have that bipartisan support. As Senator Durbin outlined, a lot of the amendments to try to pay for this sort of rob Peter to pay Paul. I have heard a lot of my Republican colleagues say let's talk about how we deal with poverty. These amendments that we have heard talked about are kind of punitive and do not really deal with the issue. I would like to address another issue, and that is how we come to an agreement here and get this place working again. On both sides of the aisle, there is a great deal of consternation that we are not legislating. We have had this problem for a while. Thursday it came to a head. There were some harsh words that were issued by some. The question is how do we get things working again. First, I remind my colleagues there are instances when this place, the Senate in particular, is still working. We had a farm bill, an immigration bill, the WRDA bill. They all had one thing in common and that is the chairman and ranking member agreed on a proposal.…”