Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise today along with my colleague from New Mexico to protest the paralysis that has kept the Senate from confirming well-qualified nominees to do their jobs. The U.S. Senate provides the opportunity for all of us to weigh in on our constitutional role of advice and consent, advice and consent regarding nominations to the executive branch and to the judicial branch by the President. Everyone in this body agrees that the Senate should, under this responsibility, serve as a significant check on the quality of Presidential nominations, the quality of nominations or nominees for the court and for executive positions. I certainly share that sentiment, that the Senate should provide this significant check on quality. The Senate should vet nominees. We should question them. We should debate them. And then we should vote on whether to confirm or reject them. What is absolutely clear, however, is that when advice and consent becomes block and destroy, then the Senate process is broken. A minority of one branch of government should never be able to systematically undermine the other two branches of government. Yet that is exactly what we have today. Look at the well-qualified nominees who have been blocked from having an up-or-down vote here in the Senate Chamber just in recent weeks: Mel Watt, nominated to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency; and then nominees to the court: Patricia Millett, Cornelia Pillard, and now Robert Wilkins.…”