Political Quotes

“I will briefly respond on a couple of issues. Things have moved very quickly and, as the Democratic leader knows, not as anticipated exactly as of midpoint last week for all sorts of different reasons--in part because of the House departure--and things have changed. I am very certain at this juncture the choices laid out before the Senate are appropriate choices, that each Senator will be able to come to the Senate and express in what direction they want to go. The distinguished Democratic leader says that extenders were stripped out of the pension bill. Let's be very clear that the pension bill that passed the House of Representatives did not have tax policy extenders in it; the pension bill that passed the Senate did not have the tax extenders policy in it. So it is a little bit hard to strip out extenders from a pension bill that did not exist in a Senate or House bill. My distinguished colleague mentioned the pension bill. Things are going well in conference on the pension bill. I argue that on the pension bill they continue, even through all the other disagreements on the pension issue itself, to go very well. The decisions were made on the substance of the pension bill, with Democratic Senators in the room and Republican Senators in the room, both in discussion throughout. I am very comfortable with the pension bill in the nature of the conference.…”