Political Quotes

“I would say to my friend that I can't vouch for the House's product. I can just say what the Congress as a whole has done since 1976, and it has limited the expenditure of funds for this purpose under the terms of the Hyde amendment. That was the reason we referred in the legislation, on page 50, which my colleague has blown up here, referring to the language in the Committee on Appropriations, which I am confident my friend, the Senator from California, voted for, just as she did in the limitation that was contained in the Affordable Care Act and all the other times that Hyde has been part of our process. This has become so unremarkable and so routine that it hardly seems like something someone would point out because this language doesn't change the status quo at all. So we have talked about ways to get past this impasse, and I would just have to say I think abandoning the Hyde amendment would be a dramatic mistake and something I am not willing to be a part of. It has become this one area, in a divisive area of abortion, where there has been bipartisan consensus for 39 years, at least to the point it has remained the law of the land effectively. To take it out and say somehow we are going to depart from that today or this week would, to me, be a dramatic expansion of taxpayer funding for this purpose that I can't support.…”