Austin Scott Quotes

The conference committee, that wonderful wrestling ring of compromise where House and Senate versions of bill are wrenched into law ...

The way it's supposed to work is you pass a bill out of the House, you pass a bill out of the Senate, you go to conference on it, and you iron out the differences.

Getting something through the House is only half the battle. So you put things in the House bill that you know will be taken out in conference and you leave things out of the House bill that will be in the Senate bill. It's like a chess game.

Ultimately, Congressional medicine is like veterinary medicine: It must be strong enough to work, and tasty enough to swallow.

You need the House, you need the Senate and you need the administration. And absent one of them, you're not going to get a heck of a lot done.

Though the views of members of the House and Senate are as divergent as the people we represent, we bear the responsibility to work through our political differences and get things done. That's our job.

While one party may possess the levers of power, one party does not possess a monopoly on good ideas. Good lawmaking, after all, is about the ability to craft effective solutions.

Tom Daschle and I worked together on Families First every step of the way, making sure that Democrats in both the House and Senate were involved in putting the agenda together.

You gotta get into some confrontations sometimes to get the right result on the floor, but I think the bulk of our membership wants us to work out problems before a bill comes to the floor.

When we do our legislation, we're not trying to figure out, 'How can I use this to run against you?' We say, 'How can we pass this bill to help both of our constituents?'

Good policy usually comes from working across the aisle, and I believe tax reform needs to be tackled with Democrats and Republicans finding common ground.

There's never a perfect bipartisan bill in the eyes of a partisan.

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.

One of the things I give Nancy Pelosi a lot of credit for is that she's able to get things passed and hold her members together because she shows us that she's doing everything possible to get our views into these bills.

The dominant color of politics is gray; difficult choices and compromise are required at almost every step of the journey toward a major new program.

All legislation of any consequence is a compromise. You have to recognize that.

The only way to deal with gridlock is compromise. And if we compromise, it means we’ll have a confused policy.

You've got to have a theme if you're going to get Congress to do something difficult.

What Congress does is respond to pressures that are upon it.

Members of Congress often have to have testimony to hang their hat on if they wish to do something for you or do something for the country.

The governor has led the way, but he's not an emperor. The legislature has to act. He cannot pass a bill by himself.

Government is about hard choices.

Our whole system was to settle disputes within the [congressional] committees. It's a waste of time to bring out a bill if you can't pass it. I just don't like to have a record vote for the sake of having a vote.

There’s a sausage machine on Capitol Hill. We’ve given the sausage machine the right kind of ingredients. Now it’s up to the sausage machine to turn out the right kind of legislation.

Congress doesn’t quite speak clearly much of the time.