Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in about 5 minutes, we are going to be, hopefully, voting for cloture on the underlying bill, the basic FAA bill, which has been the product of an awful lot of work. I think, generally speaking, we have tried to bring everybody in. Senators do have rights, and as a bill comes closer to a cloture vote or passage vote, some of those rights are exercised, which then complicates things. On the other hand, it is what the system is, and people ought to have those rights. You cannot ask everybody to sort of sit back and think through a whole bill. Something occurs to them at the last moment, and they need to come down and address that. We have tried to do that. I think we are pretty close to a slots amendment agreement. Not everybody is happy about it, but everybody has given up and everybody has gotten from it. So we will have this vote, and then we will continue work on various aspects of the bill. I hope we can get it done tonight from the Senate side. Then we have to go negotiate with the House, and their bill is quite different. But what is interesting about the aviation bill, it truly does affect America vastly. I do not know how many times I have said it employs 11 million people. Actually, it employs, directly and indirectly, probably closer to 13 million people, and it affects people's lives in every single way. They are trying to build a high-speed rail system. You cannot build a high-speed interstate system.…”