Political Quotes

“Mr. President, if I could be heard on this very briefly, my friend Senator Grassley is here, and perhaps we could take 3 minutes or so each to discuss this. We have worked on this now for more than a decade. The American people are furious at the way business is done in Washington, DC, and if ever there were a concrete reason why, we have seen it in the handling of this bipartisan effort to once and for all take business in the Senate out of the shadows and do public business in public. This has widespread, bipartisan support. It is designed to ensure that when a Senator uses one of the most powerful tools at their disposal to actually block the public from seeing public business, that Senator would be publicly accountable. That hasn't been the case, and again and again we have seen colleagues over the last decade abuse this process. It used to be years ago something that was a courtesy. Now it has come to rule life here in the Senate. Scores and scores of instances of holds have been used by both political parties. There is one Senator in this body--just one--who has objected to this coming up, and that Senator has been unwilling on multiple occasions to come to the floor of the Senate and actually state why he insists on defending secret holds. So the effort to derail secret holds is, in effect, something that is also being done in secret.…”