Political Quotes

“3 weeks of debate on this bill seems now to be coming to an end and the vote in favor of a restriction on unfunded mandates imposed on State and local governments almost certainly will be overwhelming. During the course of this 3 weeks, however, we have been faced with votes on literally dozens of amendments. Those amendments have covered two fundamentally different sets of subject matter. The first set, the normal politics, a set of amendments that had nothing to do with unfunded mandates but cover much of what the agenda of this Senate is likely to be during the course of the next 6 months with regard to votes that will be overwhelmed by votes on the merits of those issues when they are brought up in due course. So that, in most respects, that debate has been irrelevant to the agenda of the Senate and of the Congress of the United States. But dozens of other amendments, I think, including this last one which is about to be voted on, do relate to unfunded mandates themselves and almost without exception they have attempted to restrict the ambit, the scope of this unfunded mandates bill. Now the bill itself, it seems to me, is already relatively modest. It does not ban unfunded mandates as most States and local governments would have us do. It simply states that, if an unfunded mandate crosses modest threshold, it must consciously be weighed if a point of order is raised against it.”