Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the committee. I intend to be very brief in my comments tonight. I thank the chairman for his indulgence. I note that Senator Grassley, who is on the floor, and I have prosecuted this cause for more open government in the Senate for over a decade. Senator McCaskill is here. She has tried relentlessly to do the same thing. I think it is very regrettable, because we have seen, once again, tonight, as we did on Thursday, that defenders of secret holds in the Senate continue to pull out all the stops, employ every tool in the toolbox to throw a monkey wrench into the effort to open the Senate to transparency and accountability. This has been a bipartisan effort. It has always been a bipartisan effort. I particularly credit my friend from Iowa, Senator Grassley, because when we talked about this over a decade, the two of us said we are going to make this bipartisan every step of the way because sometimes in the Senate you are in the minority, sometimes you are in the Senate as part of the majority, but the cause of open and transparent government ought to be available all the time. It should not matter who is in the majority and who is in the minority. I will say the American people are furious at the way business is done in Washington, DC. The fact that it has been impossible to even get an up-or-down vote on doing Senate business in public is a textbook case of why people are so angry.…”