Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I just remind people in this body that 10 years ago the Democrats were in the majority. Indeed, then in the 2008 election that occurred 10 years ago, they strengthened that majority. House Republican Members were so far in the minority as to be irrelevant in all exchanges. There was a 60-vote majority over in the Senate. You may recall that is where the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank and other pieces of legislation that I would have thought would never pass actually did pass in that environment. A question that I hear a lot is: Why didn't Democrats do something about the Dreamer problem when they controlled all the levers of power? And it is a valid question. Senator Durbin had a bill, as you will recall, in that next session of Congress that began in January of 2009. Senator Durbin had a bill to deal with the Dreamer situation, and he worked on it all year. It never came up until December of 2010. Now, you remember in November of 2010, actually, the majority changed in the House of Representatives and there were enough Republicans elected that the Democrats would not be in the majority the next year. So here we are in a so-called lame duck session of a party that is exiting power, and I think it was December 8 of that year that, in the House, the Democrats brought Senator Durbin's bill up and passed it on the House floor, as would be expected. They did have a significant majority.…”