Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlewoman. Madam Speaker, I will strongly support this bill tonight because it not only opens our government but it enables us to meet our obligations in a proper way. But if we walk away from this tonight without having learned a lesson, this would have all been a futile exercise. The lesson that we have to learn is that we can become obsessed with one issue and close down a government over one issue. {time} 2145 When a bill becomes a law and gets signed by a President, gets judged on and approved by the Supreme Court, that is the law of the land. We have to abide by that. We should in no way continue to act as if things really didn't happen--only what is happening now happened. Secondly, we need to understand that there are no winners or losers tonight. The real losers are only the American people, who had to put up with this situation for these past weeks. If we go away tonight not learning that lesson--that we cannot allow that to happen again--it would have been a waste of time. So I hope that we move ahead on the budget commission, that we move ahead on that conference, and that we move ahead in a joint way, in a two-party system, to work on behalf of the American people.”