Political Quotes

“April Fool's Day has come to the House 2 days early, and, unfortunately, the joke is on all of us who took the Speaker at his word when he promised last December to allow a fair debate and vote on campaign finance reform. Today, we are going to consider four so-called reform bills under the suspension calendar. Now, the suspension calendar is usually reserved for noncontroversial legislation. Campaign finance reform is a tough issue and a controversial issue. Here it is now, it is 12:30 in the afternoon. We are supposed to have a debate on this at 2 o'clock. We do not even have the language of all of the various proposals that on Friday afternoon the Republican leadership said we were going to vote on. We do not even have all of the language that we are going to be asked to vote on later on this afternoon. The truth is, during the 104th Congress, Mr. Speaker, the Republicans passed a House rule that required the Speaker to notify the minority before scheduling suspensions. Yet these bills were put on the calendar without any consultation with the minority or the bipartisan group of legislators interested in passing real campaign finance reform legislation. Needless to say, absent from the list of those bills to be voted on today is the bipartisan McCain-Feingold-Shays-Meehan bill, which could pass on a simple majority vote.”