Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator very much. I will be very brief. I made these points earlier today, but I would just like to remind people as to why we are having this vote this evening. Almost unanimously, on four different occasions since 2010, Congress passed sanctions. Both sides of the aisle strongly supported sanctions being imposed upon Iran to bring them to the negotiating table. That was something which was very strongly bipartisan. When it came time to bring them to the table and begin negotiations, the President declared the goal was to end their nuclear program, and they began negotiations. And by the way, we celebrated that goal. I think there would be unanimous support for the agreement had that goal been achieved. But the President then declared that instead of bringing this as a treaty, which typically would be the case for an international agreement, or bringing it as a congressional-executive agreement, he was going to call this an executive agreement so that only he would be involved in it. That being known to this body, again in a very strong, bipartisan way--98 to 1--we voted for the first time since I have been here to take power away from the President and to keep him from invoking the national security waivers he had with the sanctions and to say: No, we want 60 days to go through this deal and we want the right to approve or disapprove and to vote our conscience.…”