Political Quotes

“I wish to thank the chairman of the Appropriations Committee for her comments and all of the effort she has made and the bipartisan cooperation there has been to get bills to the floor. But we are in kind of a pickle right now. We are talking about a continuing resolution. A continuing resolution means we didn't get our work done. If we had the appropriations bills passed through this body, we wouldn't need a continuing resolution. Every agency would understand what it can spend for the whole next year. Instead, we are quibbling over how long a continuing resolution we ought to have and what ought to be in it. We haven't done total appropriations by the October 1 deadline for I am not even sure how many years. That would be the answer to what we are going through right now. If we got to debate each of those bills in a timely fashion, with an open amendment process--I appreciate there has been an open amendment process in the committee. I am always disturbed that we haven't had much of an open amendment process around here on the floor. Every time a bill comes to the floor--almost every time a bill comes to the floor--there are negotiations about how many amendments each side can have. I have seen those negotiations go on for 2 weeks. Do you know how many amendments we could vote on in 2 weeks? I think we could probably vote on 50, maybe 100 in 2 weeks.…”