Political Quotes

“Madam President, I thank my friend and my colleague, the Senator from Texas, for his remarks and I speak briefly to respond to a couple of points that have come up today. First of all, it is important for us to remember that although the rules of our body might allow for a conference committee to meet in public, and although that may have happened in the past from time to time, it is not the norm. In asking around to some senior staff members who have been here longer than I have, it typically has not happened in recent years. In fact, it has become relatively rare in recent years. So to suggest it necessarily is an open process because it has the capacity to be made into an open process, those are not the same things. Typically, we can legitimately expect for this to be a backroom, closed-door process. That is not the end of the world; we, of course, need conference committees. They do valuable, important work. We are not disputing that. We are not disputing the fact that sometimes it is important for conference committees to meet in order to reconcile competing versions of the same legislation--one passed in the House and one passed in the Senate. But what we are talking about here is a very limited request: to limit the scope of their work so as to exclude the possibility of a debt limit increase without the 60-vote threshold.…”