Political Quotes

“we have an attempt to move and rush through the Senate an immigration bill before the American people can absorb what is in it. I think this is a very bad policy. The bill was introduced at 2 a.m. 8 days ago. It was set for markup in the committee today. Our diligent staff has been trying to read it and absorb it, and they are having a great deal of difficulty sifting through this complicated 844-page bill. Senator Grassley, the ranking Republican on the committee, has asked for the bill to be put over for 1 week. Next week is a recess, so now it will come up in 2 weeks to be presented and passed out of committee. On Monday, we had a hearing. I will not say it was a circus, but it was impossible to absorb all the information. Twenty-three witnesses testified, one right after the other, 5 or so minutes each. The Senators who were here on Monday--not a lot--had 5 minutes of questioning and not much was resolved. They did not know what was in the bill either. They were just testifying about policy, basically. Nobody could explain exactly how the bill is going to work. So people say: You should be able to handle a bill like that. You should be able to read an 844-page bill. So I just want to show why this is a pretty complicated process and why a piece of legislation such as this has to be carefully read. It is not easy to do so. So this is page 65 of the bill that I will show you. It deals with an issue I talked about yesterday.…”