Political Quotes

“the series of votes that we have concluded in the last 24 hours, with the last vote that just concluded, brings to its completion a sad and a sordid moment in the history of the Senate. I want to just wrap up to leave a record of what took place. Before we got into this parliamentary rigmarole, there were two things that were pretty clear: one, a Congressional Review Act, a statute in American law, that allows Congress to override a very narrow set of Executive actions for a very narrow time period. The narrow set of Executive actions is EPA rulemakings. And the timeframe is set by the Congressional Review Act, but it is, at most, months. That is the law, or was the law until our procedural shenanigans intervened, and it had been the law for quite a long time. The Congressional Review Act goes back 30 years. So there was a long, long, long tradition of obeying this law. It is not hard to figure out what a rule is because rulemakings have a very distinct procedural set of steps that they go through, and the Congressional Review Act was carefully crafted to deal just with those rules, including a provision that if the executive branch tried to hide a rule by not submitting it, that our Government Accountability Office was authorized to blow a whistle and say: No, that is actually a rule, in which case, it would have to come over here for a review under the Congressional Review Act.”