Political Quotes

“I appreciate the gentleman's comments, and I think he is absolutely right in the first half, and absolutely wrong in the second half. I would disagree with my colleague's comments that Democrats have not had an opportunity to contribute to the process. We have in the past. We worked in a bipartisan way. It is, however, not true that this year everything is different. Something was different, but not what I believe the ranking member said. That is that we did include a large number of Republican provisions, certainly in committee by the amendment process, and on the floor. The one sort of stark number here is, on the floor, we have not had a large number of Republican amendments. There are a couple of reasons for that. Number one, we have, I think, 15 or 16 en bloc packages, and there are a large number of Republican amendments contained in that en bloc package. But as far as standalone amendments, there are a couple of problems. One, traditionally, and this has happened to us as well, we had a lot of our more controversial amendments, unless the majority party--at the time, the Republicans--thought it was to their advantage to have us vote on something that made us look bad, then they would let it in. Otherwise, they wouldn't. We kind of did the same thing. If there were amendments that we didn't want, we didn't keep them. We did allow for Republican priorities.…”