Political Quotes

“I rise today to discuss something extremely important to each one of us in this wonderful body, which is called civility and trust. I rise to discuss them because they have been lost in Washington. I look around and we are all friends, and for some reason we lost trust in each other. We don't seem to spend enough time with each other. I can remember Senator Robert C. Byrd, who was the longest serving Senator in the history of the U.S. Senate, and he always told me what a place this was. He said that the Senate is something special. He even wrote a book about it, about how the Senate was to operate, what the Founding Fathers' intent was for the bipartisan, bicameral body that George Washington explained so eloquently, and what our role was as the most deliberative body in the world. The whole world depends on us kind of cooling things off and making things work. But as we have seen, it hasn't done what it is supposed to do, and it is not to blame one person or the other or one party or the other. I guess we can all say that it is all of our fault for letting it denigrate to this point. Several years ago, I took a personal pledge. I just knew something was wrong. When I first got here, I looked around and I saw that we were all expected to make phone calls raising money every day to our respective parties, and that money would be used for a couple of purposes.…”