Political Quotes

“Legislatively, this is a terrible idea, to introduce a 13-page sanctions bill at the last possible second and expect us to vote on it without knowing the true impacts of it. I absolutely agree that we should have tools to hold the Chinese, the Russians, anyone accountable who does any of the things that the gentleman said. Within current law, there are a ton of tools to do precisely that. Putting in law brand-new sanctions legislation without thinking about it is a bad idea. And if this was so crucial and so important, why are we seeing it just at this last second? There was somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 ideas submitted to be added to the defense bill all along the process. We would have had time to work on it and think about it and actually craft a decent piece of legislation. This clearly does not have that objective in mind or they would have introduced it a long time ago. This is a bad way to make law. Mr. Speaker, I urge us to vote ``no'' and not to jeopardize all the incredible work that Members on both sides of the aisle did in this bill. There are a ton of Members, Republicans and Democrats alike; those 2,000 provisions are roughly equal between Republicans and Democrats. We have an incredibly bipartisan piece of legislation before us in which individual Members decided something is important, worked the issue, and got us a product that we could support. Mr.…”