Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to speak about the Senate's processing of judicial nominations, and I ask you to forgive me if I am a bit irritable, but we have had a lot of complaints about how fast President Obama's nominations are going forward. I think they are moving rather well. I think some people who are now complaining have forgotten how they handled President Bush's nominees--and in a much more unacceptable fashion. I wish to emphasize that all of this is not to lay the groundwork for some sort of payback, because I think we all ought to rise to the challenge of handling nominations properly, but to set the record straight, because there has been a lot of misinformation and some of our newer Senators don't know how things have happened. Allegations of unprecedented obstruction and delay have been bandied about--some in the press also--but the reality is that the Democrats' systematic obstruction of judicial nominees during the Bush administration was unprecedented then and it is unmatched now. Soon after President Bush was elected, a group of well-known liberal professors--Laurence Tribe, Marsha Greenberger, and Cass Sunstein--met with the Democratic leadership in the Senate. The New York Times reported on that meeting. I believe it was in January, before the session began, and the Times reported that they proposed ``changing the ground rules'' of the confirmation process.…”