Karl E. Mundt Quotes

We’ve had members of the Senate who have been there 30 years and haven’t gotten good at it yet.

I have been in the Senate for 30 years practicing comedy.

The House Republicans are not the enemy, they’re the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.

I have been immeasurably honored to serve the people of Maine for nearly 40 years in public office and for the past 17 years in the United States Senate. It was incredibly difficult to decide that I would not seek a fourth term in the Senate.

What happens in the Senate is the Republicans sink to the lowest common denominator.

Cheerleading gave me a love of sports, which I brought to the Senate. I can talk to the good ol' boys about college sports because I follow it like they do.

There's one advantage in having been around as long as I have. Everybody in the Senate knows me, and - I'm going to say something presumptuous, to repeat myself - I think most respect me.

Well, I was 29 years old when I came to the United States Senate, and I have learned a lot.

The Senate floor is and always has been the great arena of our democracy. I spent eight years in my younger life as a boxer, and sometimes when I enter the chamber, I think, 'This is the ring. The American people can see us here and listen to our arguments. This is where the fights matter.'

…the Senate, a small body of egos…

A Senator of the United States … serves his people by joining in the petty squabbles that occupy so much time of the Senate today. I may have grown cynical from long service, but this is a tendency I do not like, and I sometimes think I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years and listen to it.

Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan [is] easily the most original thinker in the Senate.

The Senate has no army, no navy, no patronage, no lucrative offices, nor glittering honors to bestow. Around us there is no swarm of greedy expectants rendering us homage, anticipating our wishes, and ready to execute our commands. How is it with the President [Andrew Jackson]? Is he powerless? He is felt from one extremity to the other of this republic. By means of principles which he has introduced [the spoils system], and innovations which he has made in our institutions, alas! but too much countenanced by Congress and a confiding people, he exercises uncontrolled the power of the state. In one hand he holds the purse and in the other brandishes the sword of the country! Myriads of dependents and partisans scattered over the land are ever ready to sing hosannas to him and to laud to the skies what ever he does. He has swept over the government like a tropical tornado.

Whenever anyone complains about the confirmation process, it means their guy is getting roughed up.

If Senator McCarthy believed those things when he said them about the Senate Committee then there is pretty solid ground to say that he ought to be expelled from the Senate for moral incapacity. If he put those things in there honestly believing them to be true, then he has evidently suffered gigantic mental delusions, and it may be argued with much force, that he should be expelled from the Senate for mental difficulty.

Resolved, that the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, is unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate, is contrary to senatorial traditions, and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute, and such conduct is hereby condemned.

This is all that we want ... to nullify the nullifyers [in Congress].

Whereas in the Fall of 1980 the frame of the new Senate Office Building was covered with plastic sheathing in order that construction might continue during the winter months; and Whereas the plastic cover has now been removed revealing, as feared, a building whose banality is exceeded only by its expense; and Whereas, even in a democracy there are things that it is as well the people do not know about their government; Therefore, be it resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that the plastic cover be put back.

We have a level of obstruction and an abuse of the Senate rules that we have never had before… We have a dysfunctional Senate. Some say it’s a broken Senate.

I just could not stand to look at the lack of courage in the Senate.

The powers of the Senate over appointments were trifled with and disregarded by reappointing persons who had been already rejected …. The veto power conferred by the Constitution as a remedy for ill-considered legislation, was turned by him into a weapon of offence against Congress

Do I have comedy writers? Of course I have writers—535 of them—100 in the Senate and 435 in the House.

The Senate can’t agree to cross the street.

None of us is pure or without flaw, but when those flaws damage the institution of the Senate, it is time to have the grace to go. But Senator [Robert W.] Packwood has chosen to do the opposite. He has chosen to stay in spite of the continuing damage he is doing.