Political Quotes

“Mr. President, for 62 days several of my colleagues and I have objected to the majority's request for unanimous consent to circumvent regular order to go to conference with the House on the budget. They want permission to skip a few steps in the process, and jump straight to the closed-door back-room meetings. There, senior negotiators of the House and Senate will be free to wait until a convenient, artificial deadline and ram through their compromise-- un-amended, un-debated and mostly un-read. And with the country backed up against another economic cliff crisis, we are concerned they will exploit that opportunity to sneak a debt- limit increase into the budget. We think that is inappropriate. And yet, objecting to this dysfunctional, unrepublican, undemocratic process has invited anger and criticism from colleagues here on both sides of the aisle. We just don't get it, you see. Proceeding to a secret, closed-door, back-room, 11th-hour deal, we are told, is the way the process works. It is the way the Senate works. It is the way the House works. It is the way Washington works. We know this. That is why we're objecting. In case nobody has noticed, the way Washington works stinks. Closed-door, back room, cliff deals are not the solution, they are the problem. The unspoken premise of every argument we have heard in favor of going to conference on this budget without conditions is that Congress knows what it is doing.…”