Congress & Legislation
Page 7
- Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything—it can stop the Vietnam War. It can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.
- It’s very hard from a distance to figure out who has lost their minds. One party, the other party, all of us, the president.
- The fact that the senators aren’t here and Harry Reid is off somewhere is all the evidence that you need to know that they want to shut down the government. I personally believe that Sen. Reid and the president — for political purposes — want to shut down the government.
- Hey, you know if Ted Cruz runs out of material there to speak of in this filibuster of his, he can always just read the Obamacare bill itself, because I bet you no one else there on the Senate floor has actually read it. If he would read it, though, then perhaps Nancy Pelosi, she’d be watching the C-SPAN station there, and she’d be able to say, ‘Oh, that is what is in it.
- But the law is not a breast that fills itself with milk. Nor are the lacteal veins of the law supplied with milk from a source outside the society. Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or one class unless another citizen or other classes have been forced to send it in. If every person draws from the treasury the amount that he has put in, it is true, then, that the law plunders nobody. But this procedure does nothing for the persons who have no money. It does not promote equality of income. The law can be an instrument of equalization only when it takes from some persons and gives to others, other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder.
- Tactics and strategies ought to be based on what the real world is, and we do not have the political power to do this. We're not about to shut the government down over the fact that we cannot, only controlling one house of Congress, tell the president that we’re not going to fund any portion of [Obamacare]. Because we can’t do that.
- I think I've learned one thing about this president, and that is he's very cautious. Maybe - in this instance - too cautious.
- This is the way it has to be. The Senate has changed.
- This country's obsession with the private lives of famous people is tragic. It's tragic in the sense that it is so clearly a projection of people's frustration about their government, their economy, their own spiritual bankruptcy. You have no voice in Washington. In Washington, or in any statehouse, no one actually cares what you think. So you post online, you vote with a Roman-esque thumbs up or down on the celebrity debacle of the day. That is your right. It's also fatal misdirection of your voice and need to judge. Occupy Wall Street, on their worst day, had more integrity than the comments page of this website ever will.
- Did I ever tell my constituents that if they liked their plan they could keep it? I would have if I ever met anybody who liked his or her plan, but that was not my experience, that was not my experience. And it was not my experience as a mother of five, who occasionally has a bad back and the rest of that. I was considered a poor risk, even though I had some resources and thought I was quite strong for having five children. But the insurance company didn’t see it that way.
- While it’s possible to recover from fiscal bankruptcy, we will never recover from the moral bankruptcy in Washington. We will never build a free and prosperous country built upon the ruins of the civil society. But this week in Washington, Harry Reid’s Senate will spend the entire week using the power of government to infringe upon our liberty and destroy the civil society.
- Recently in Washington, unfortunately, we have seen examples of the wrong kind of leadership -- when politicians choose scorched earth over common ground, when they operate in what I call the ‘evidence-free zone,’ with ideology trumping everything else.