Political Quotes

“Mr. President, as you know, we have been back home in our States for the last couple of weeks or traveling, listening to our constituents. It was great to be back home and to spend some time talking to the people who I work for about the challenges facing our country and what we have been doing in the U.S. Senate to try to address those challenges. While it is always true that people wish there would be more consensus building and more solutions offered, I would say that, by and large, people feel we had a pretty productive 2015 and are hoping we can continue that sort of productivity here in the Senate in 2016, even though this is a Presidential election year. Yesterday was a good example of that productivity. We passed a trademark enforcement piece of legislation basically without--it was unanimous, to the best of my knowledge. All the Senators here in the Chamber voted for it without going through the official procedural hoops that are required in order to process legislation here in the Senate. Previously we passed legislation--recently the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act--to deal with the crisis involving opioid or prescription drug painkillers that are being abused around the country, and people are unfortunately falling into that trap, and then the cheap heroin that sometimes is used as a substitute if people can't find the opioid prescription drugs. So Congress actually has been doing the people's business here.…”