Political Quotes

“I will speak very briefly. While I voted to keep the government going, this is not the way to govern. We should not be doing stopgap measures. We will be back here soon. We will have a relatively short time--a couple of weeks--to finally do our work, the work we should have done for the last 6 months. We will have to address sequestration on both sides of the ledger--on defense and nondefense--and raise the caps for both. We have to speak on one of the greatest issues in our country today, and that is the Dreamers, and we have to address that and have votes up or down on the Senate floor. I intend to vote to protect Dreamers. We have to vote on the Children's Health Insurance Program. There are so many others. I want Senators on both sides of the aisle to know--and I have talked to both Republicans and Democrats--Senator Cochran and I and others have tried to keep the appropriations process going. We will continue to do that. We will do that when we come back. There will not be another continuing resolution without a bipartisan budget agreement. Mr. President, this is not how we should govern in the U.S. Senate. We have once again found ourselves on the edge of a manufactured, made- in-Washington crisis. Once again, we are forced into political games at the eleventh hour by the imminent threat of a Republican shutdown. This time that threat has fallen right before Christmas and the holidays. There is no reason we should find ourselves in this situation.…”