Political Quotes

“yesterday we got down to work on amendments for the national defense authorization legislation. We filed a substitute amendment that included 93 bipartisan amendments. When I say 93, there are 44 Democratic, 44 Republican, and I think 5 more that we have from both sides. This is what we have been trying to do. Both Senator Reed and I have been encouraging people to bring amendments to the floor for a long period of time. In fact, the majority leader, Senator McConnell, has made several appeals that in the event this gets bogged down, go ahead and bring your amendments down so we can work with you. That is what we did. The substitute that we used yesterday incorporated 93 amendments, and they were actually brought to us for fear that what happened a year ago would happen again. I am not sure that the system is wrong when it does this, but any one Member of the Democrats or Republicans can stop an amendment from coming forward. It takes unanimous consent. People don't understand that. Right now, we are in a position where one individual--last year, one individual, and at one point, two individuals said they were stopping all amendments unless they got certain consideration for their own amendment. That seems to be happening again now. Nonetheless, that is why we have all of these amendments, and that is what we have done. I heard a couple of my colleagues say that Republicans are blocking consideration of an amendment on Iran, the Senator Udall amendment.…”