Political Quotes

“I said this earlier this morning: we find ourselves at an interesting moment. This morning we had a cloture vote which gave us the opportunity to start afresh. We started in a very positive way in that we had a strong bipartisan show of support for an amendment, the Martinez-Hagel amendment. That is a good alternative. That is what we will be voting on tomorrow morning. We left that meeting with the understanding that we would be able to debate amendments and bring up amendments and discuss amendments to this issue of immigration given the fact that it is a complex issue. And I think this Senate has come to the real point where we agree it is going to take a comprehensive approach to address the illegal and undocumented people coming into this country across our borders. That is real progress over the last week. However, the problem we have, we have not been given the opportunity to treat each of these colleagues in this room fairly, allowing them to come forward and offer their amendments and to have them debated, to improve, to modify, to probably win some and to lose some, but to help shape legislation as we did on other bills, including the transportation bill, highway bill, other large, complex bills in this Senate. Over the course of the day it was my expectation as we set out this morning, we take a step forward in terms of debating an amendment and looking at the overall immigration bill and offering amendments on that immigration bill to improve it.…”