Political Quotes

“while we are waiting for other Senators, let me once again encourage Members of the Senate to come down and talk about their amendments. It is kind of an awkward situation that we have here, and we are all aware of this, but the Senate rules say that amendments can't come to the floor except by unanimous consent. That means that if there is one person who objects to having an amendment come up and be considered, then all that person has to do is object. Frankly, that happened last year. We had a couple Members who were holding out for a nongermane amendment they wanted to consider, and they stated they would hold up all the other amendments. That happened, and it looks like it is happening again this year, but we are prepared this year because, anticipating that would be the case, yesterday we passed the 93 amendments with the bill--that we went to as the underlying bill. We now have 93 amendments in addition to the amendments we already had. We are probably now in excess of 200 amendments that we have had on this bill since its inception. Most of these amendments are bipartisan. In fact, the 93 amendments we adopted yesterday were amendments we had considered in the committee I chair, the Senate Armed Services Committee. Of those amendments, 44 were Democrats', 44 were Republicans', and the rest were bipartisan. So this is not really that partisan of a bill.…”