Political Quotes

“One of the distinguishing characteristics of a democracy is that you have choices, you have options. I am not intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Soviet government. But I have it on good authority that they had elections in the Soviet Union. But the big difference was the government decided who was on the ballot. They decided that very carefully. Only those candidates who had been very carefully screened by the Communist Party officials could appear on the ballot. So people had choices. It was just the choices were very limited. They were limited so as to guarantee a certain foreordained outcome. Now, if you will forgive the analogy, what we have here makes sense. It makes sense that all of the 50 States are represented but only if, in fact, we are presented with actual legitimate choices, with actual legitimate options. One of the reasons we have seen legislation pushed through at the very last minute, and our colleagues in this body vote for that legislation overwhelmingly, is they are told at the moment they have no other option: You have a binary choice. You can vote yes or you can vote no, but you do not really have the option of making any changes. So a lot of times people vote for something, even if it is a bill they otherwise did not like, or if it had a lot of problems with it, they will vote for it because they conclude that on balance, voting yes is better than voting no. The problem is, we are supposed to have more options than that.…”