Political Quotes

“now that cloture has been invoked on the substitute bill, we are one step closer to completing this product, which has been the subject of bipartisan negotiation with the White House for quite some time. I know a lot of hard work has been put into this, and I want to thank all of our colleagues who have contributed to it. After much anticipation, we finally received the bill text earlier this week. Of course, a lot of it was what we expected to see: funding for roads, bridges, ports, waterways, airports, and broadband. Under normal circumstances, an infrastructure bill would go through a long and arduous committee process before ever coming to the floor. Members of the committees of jurisdiction would have an opportunity to debate and offer amendments and get votes on their proposals to try to improve the bill at the committee level. This provides a very important part of the ability of everybody to be able to participate in the process, one that is denied members of their committees of relevant jurisdiction when a bill comes to the floor already negotiated. One of the challenges is when you have 20 people who agree on something and then they bring it to the floor, and, of course, then the 80 who have not been part of that discussion want to participate and want to try to improve the underlying bill. I hope that now that the cloture on the substitute has been invoked, there will be an opportunity for us to vote on some additional amendments.…”