Political Quotes

“I will turn to the chairman in a moment, but we are in an unusual situation. When we step back and look at this bill, we see we have an important bill that is a national security issue, an issue of fairness and equity, and we have a good bill on the floor that does not have 60 votes. That is pretty clear today, after all of the discussions. Yet we are not allowed--in spite of having good amendments which can make this bill even better, we are not being allowed to move those amendments forward at all. It is very clear by the last vote where the vote was, I think almost unanimous, that people are not serious about moving these amendments forward one at a time. I think it is disrespectful to the body itself because they are good amendments on both sides of the aisle that need to be debated and that need to come to a vote, and we are not allowed to do that. It is coming from the other side of the aisle. I think that we need to get serious about it. It needs to be a dignified debate and a civil debate. Right now, we are not going to finish the bill. It is in effect being blocked by the other side because we are not allowed to get amendments to the floor so that at some point this bill could reach a threshold of 60 votes. So I am very frustrated now, and I think colleagues on both sides of the aisle are. I know the chairman is. We had about 2 hours of debate earlier this afternoon that made it very apparent that the other side is trying to stop the bill.…”