Political Quotes

“I rise to talk about the challenge of this Chamber being a Chamber that can deliberate and decide issues, the big issues facing America. I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone that the Senate, once famed as the world's greatest deliberative body, has become paralyzed. At the heart of that paralysis is a change in the use of the filibuster. ``Filibuster'' is a term I believe comes from the Dutch, and it refers to piracy. In this context, it is about someone taking over this Chamber--taking over the normal process by which we debate issues and decide issues by majority vote. In the past, when everyone understood the very heart of what we do is to make decisions by majority vote, the filibuster--the takeover of this Chamber, the objection to a simple majority vote--was very rare. People did this only once or twice in a career for some issue of profound personal values or of extreme concern to an issue in their State, and it was most often small factions who would do this. In 1916, there was a debate--a debate that went on about whether to put weaponry on our commercial shipping. This was pre-World War I. In the course of that debate, there was a small faction who said: We are going to interrupt and we are going to object to the simple majority because we strongly oppose the United States putting any defenses on its merchant vessels, even though those vessels were being sunk by the Germans as they went over to Europe.…”