Political Quotes

“To respond to a few of my friend's points, Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by agreeing with my friend, actually. As he knows, I agree with his point that this should have been done many months ago, and could have been done, in my view, many months ago. We should have done this in December. I don't think we did the country or ourselves or the President any favors by delaying that. So my friend is right about that decision, and I hope we all learn a lesson from it. I also agree with my friend that, because we delayed, the 2018 appropriations process will be extremely difficult and truncated. It will make work harder. We may find ourselves back here in a number of months asking for some brief extension as we continue to work through our problems. I hope not, but my friend's observation on that point I agree with. I want to disagree with my friend pretty strongly about his observation about the 160 riders that we decided in the negotiation not to press, and I want to explain why we decided not to press them. Frankly, we don't need to press them anymore. Almost 160 of those were designed to limit or reverse rulings of the last administration-- either rules or executive decisions. Well, Mr. Trump is now the President of the United States and he is going to have the ability to do almost all of those things on his own. He doesn't need legislative instruction from us.…”