Political Quotes

“I am glad an agreement has been reached in which President Obama will finally get Senate confirmation votes on his appointees to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Labor, and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. This agreement, as I understand it, will also provide that the President's new nominees for the National Labor Relations Board will be rapidly confirmed. That is a step forward. While this agreement addresses the immediate need for the President of the United States to have his Cabinet and his senior staff confirmed, this agreement today only addresses one symptom of a seriously dysfunctional Senate. The issue that must now be addressed is how we create a process and a set of rules in the Senate that allows us to respond to the needs of the American people in a timely and effective way--something virtually everyone agrees is not happening now. The Senate cannot function with any degree of effectiveness if a supermajority of 60 votes is needed to pass virtually any piece of legislation and if we waste huge amounts of time not debating the real issues facing working people but waiting for motions to proceed hour after hour where nobody is even on the floor of the Senate. The good news is that I think the Nation is now focused on the dysfunctionality of the Senate and the need for us to have rules or a process that allows us to address the enormous problems facing our country.…”