Political Quotes

“we just finished up a vote on the Senate floor where we fell four votes short of opening debate on a bill to deal with police reform--four votes short. We were four votes short of opening debate to discuss it. Every single Republican voted for this--and a handful of Democrats. But the vast majority of Democrats actually said: No, we don't want to debate this bill. We will only debate the Pelosi bill when it comes out of the House. Well, that is absurd. That didn't happen, I can assure you, when Speaker Boehner was the leader of the House, that the Senate said ``I will tell you what, we are going to wait and see whatever Speaker Boehner sends over to Harry Reid'' and Harry Reid would say ``Oh, yes, please. We will take up whatever the Boehner bill is.'' That was never done, and they know that. This is such an odd, peculiar season in our country politically and a painful season in our country culturally and practically. Our hope was to have a real debate on a real bill. I was part of the team in writing this bill. This bill was a genuine push to reform how we do police work and to increase accountability and transparency across the country. The bill that we just needed four Democrats to join--just four Democrats to join--to be able to open it up for debate would have banned choke holds across the country. It would have required the reporting of all serious bodily injury or death in police custody from everywhere in the country, to start tracking all of this.…”