Political Quotes

“I know it is several minutes past 5. I doubt very much if we will use the 30 minutes. We will probably be able to yield back time so the vote can be at 5:30, although I am not making that request at this point. Listening to the distinguished chair of the Appropriations Committee, the senior Senator from Maryland, I had to agree with everything she was saying. This is the fourteenth day of the government shutdown, and by refusing to pass a clean continuing resolution to fund the operations of the Federal government, Republicans continue to threaten the critical functioning of all three branches of government. With this ongoing shutdown of the entire Federal government, a handful of ideologues in the House of Representatives are holding the entire judicial system hostage and this threatens our entire democracy. One critical problem is that we have more than 90 judicial vacancies, including 39 that have been designated as emergency vacancies due to high caseloads by the non-partisan Administrative Office of the Courts. While we will vote to confirm two additional judges today, we are moving far too slowly and are not keeping pace with the urgent needs of our Federal judiciary. We must do better. Both of the district court nominees we are voting on today have been nominated to fill vacancies that were named judicial emergencies by the nonpartisan Administrative Office of the Courts. Andrea Wood is nominated to a judicial emergency vacancy in the U.S.…”