Political Quotes

“last year, this body unanimously passed 41 bills from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Now, 16 of those bills, for one reason or another, didn't end up getting signed into law last year. Some of those bills perhaps were casualties of the legislative calendar but for one reason or another didn't make it through but remained undisputed and remained noncontroversial. They have been reintroduced by Republican and Democratic Senators and are cleared on the Republican side of the aisle. It is important to note here that these noncontroversial, bipartisan bills all remain completely unchanged. Not a single letter, not a single period, comma, or exclamation mark has been altered on them. They remain utterly noncontroversial--not a whiff of partisan dispute between them. In the past, these bills were, in many circumstances, packaged together. It has been something of a custom in the Senate to package together groups of bills. Lands bills in some cases were paired together as part of much larger bills. In some instances, parts of some of those bills were themselves controversial--larger bills, bills that were sometimes written in secret and not available to individual Members to review prior to the time that they were propounded for a unanimous consent request on the floor. So today, I am going to make an entirely reasonable offer to move four bills off of the floor from among that group that passed last year by unanimous consent in the Senate.”