Political Quotes

“Mr. President, would the Senator from Illinois agree, however--because I think it is important to point out that this is not something that happened in the last few years. The Senator from Alaska had a colleague elected in 2008 who, when he ran again for election in 2014, the argument could be made against him that he had never gotten a vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate on a single amendment in a 6-year term in the Senate. I came here in 2005. In the first 8 years that I was here as a Senator, I witnessed time and again the very thing you are talking about, where amendments were shut down, the tree was filled, in the parliamentary language that we use here in the Senate. So I would ask the Senator: Is this not a--this is not an issue that has cropped up in the last few years. Is this not a problem that originated some time ago and, as the Senator is suggesting, that we need to do away with the supermajority requirement that requires us here as Senators to work together in a bipartisan way to find common ground to fix what ails the Senate? I would argue and a lot would argue that what ails the Senate right now requires nothing more than behavioral change. We have to agree that when somebody offers an amendment on one side, that it is not going to be blocked immediately and we get into this lockdown. That is what happened in recent years and in the last couple of examples we have had, as recently as last week, blocking the motion to proceed to the bill.…”