Political Quotes

“Mr. President, yesterday our friends across the aisle blocked--filibustered, really--a $40 billion funding bill that would have paid the funds necessary to keep the Department of Homeland Security running through the rest of this fiscal year. I understand they had some differences over the content of the legislation the House passed, but it is undeniable that the House acted responsibly by passing this appropriations bill, particularly at a time of heightened security concerns not only here at home but around the world. Of course, the part that I guess confused me the most is our Democratic friends said: Well, we don't want to debate the bill, but what we want is a clean DHS appropriations bill. So they wanted to get to the end of the process without even starting the process, which strikes me as odd. As I pointed out last week during the Senate debate on the Keystone XL Pipeline, Senator Durbin from Illinois, the assistant minority leader, spoke very sincerely in support of a process surrounding that bill. We didn't all agree that the Keystone Pipeline should be passed, but we did at least have an open amendment process that allowed everyone to express their point of view and to get votes on amendments, up or down, before concluding that piece of legislation. I think the most notable part of that was that we actually had more votes in the Senate during the 3 weeks we were on the Keystone XL Pipeline than we had all of last year under the previous management.…”