Political Quotes

“I join in raising these issues tonight about the government shutdown. The reason so many of us have referred to it simply as the ``Trump shutdown'' is because the President is the person who led the way to have the government shut down. He said that before the shutdown, as we all know. We have heard the statement he made in the Oval Office. Then, of course, we went forward. I think it is important to reset where we have been and where we are. There was an agreement in this body, the U.S. Senate, by 100 Senators, just before Christmas, to extend funding for the government for a short period of time so that if there were issues to debate between now and February, we could do that. It is hard to get 100 Senators to agree on anything around here, but of course that is what happened. Then it went to the House, and we know what happened after that. The President got pressure from rightwing talk show hosts, and I guess they have more influence on him than a lot of Americans, who never want a government shutdown. As we stand here tonight, 9 of 15 Federal Departments are closed, shut down, and I am not even itemizing the number of Agencies that is. Then we came into the new year, on January 3--I don't know what hour it was, but it was in the evening--with a new majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, a Democratic majority. What did that Democratic majority do? What did the Democratic House Speaker do?…”