Marvin Henry “Mickey” Edwards Quotes

I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done.

The Congress is the place where ordinary mortals go about the business of compromise—of compromise that gets us through the day.

But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you've got to compromise. You've got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.

All legislation is founded upon the principle of mutual concession.

Compromise created the Constitution.

We have a constitution that says that the way you get things is by passing legislation, not by threatening to destroy the country unless you get your way.

Legislation is the art of compromise.

I'm looking forward to going to Congress to pursue my Working Families Agenda and find areas of bipartisan agreement to move forward on important legislation.

Congress should get the job done.

In the Senate, where 60 votes are required to do anything important, you have to work with your colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

Government is necessary for our survival. We need government in order to survive. The Founding Fathers created a special place for government. It is called the Constitution.

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate.

I wish I could set deadlines for the Congress, but that's just not the way the Constitution is written.

If you look through history, all of the great work we've done in Congress has been around a table of compromise, when it comes to the most difficult problems.

Bipartisanship is “the oil of national government.”

Nearly all legislation is the result of compromise.

The Congress must regain the will to govern.

Our greatest present disloyalty to the Constitution lies in the fact that we do not study and criticize it as did the men who devised and adopted it. They met novel and desperate situations by establishing unheard-of and revolutionary forms of government.

From time to time we must remind ourselves that the President has a role in the legislative process.

Because all of us believe that our democratic form of government can cope adequately with modern problems as they arise, it is patriotic as well as logical for us to prove that we can meet new national needs with new laws consistent with a historic constitutional framework clearly intended to receive liberal and not narrow interpretation.

Let us give our Republic not the best possible laws but the best which they will bear.

It is a mere truism to say that, in politics, there has to be one continual compromise. Of course now and then questions arise upon which a compromise is inadmissible. There could be no compromise with secession, and there was none. There should be no avoidable compromise about any great moral question. But only a very few great reforms or great measures of any kind can be carried through without concession. No student of American history needs to be reminded that the Constitution itself is a bundle of compromises, and was adopted only because of this fact, and that the same thing is true of the Emancipation Proclamation.

if we stop talking at one another, and start talking with one another, we can get a lot done.

Consensus is the essence of the legislative process.

How a constitution is written can sometimes matter almost as much as what it contains.