Legislative Experience Quotes

I have done things politically, and I've been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I've been doing it as a part-time job.

The only way to get anywhere in Congress is to stay there and let seniority take its course.

I have learned how to take votes where I had to hold my nose because I had to compromise - something that you learn to do, especially when you have been in the minority.

I've been in Congress 14 years. I've been on the Appropriations Committee in which we are in charge of trying to move legislation.

When a member of the House moves over to the Senate, he raises the IQ of both bodies.

I arrived in Hartford as a 25-year-old naive state legislator who believed in universal health care. I rose to become the 29-year-old Chairman of the legislature's Health Committee.

Violence against women is as American as apple pie. I know, not only as a legislator, but from personal experience.

It wasn't until after I was reelected in 1982 that I thought of myself as a long-term member of Congress.

I have been an organizer and then activist and a legislator, all of that. But then there's this big gap after I advanced in Congress and ended up as the ranking member of financial services committee. It took me into the financial services issues and Wall Street and Dodd Frank. And it took me away from the things that I did years ago.

I see more clearly than ever, and I thought I saw before, that congressional life is not the best introduction to the President's house. Great and fully equipped as the general [James Garfield] is, there are embarrassments growing out of his long and brilliant career in Congress, which Jackson and Lincoln, and Grant, and myself, escaped.

One of the most interesting things that I'm seeing of the Trump picks is such a heavy business and financial focus. I can't help but feel like this is going to throw a lot of policy weight and details back to Congress, because these are not people who have a lot of experience drafting legislation.

Madam Speaker, I have spent more than half my life as a member of the Resources Committee. In that time I have supported numerous wilderness designations. In fact, I cannot recall ever opposing a wilderness bill.

I loved my time in Congress, but people who spend all of their time planning to run for office have very few useful skills to deploy when they finally get there.

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

I view my time in politics as a chapter, not my life.

There is only one thing I want to say about Ohio that has a political tinge, and that is that I think a mistake has been made of recent years in Ohio in failing to continue as our representatives the same people term after term. I do not need to tell a Washington audience, among whom there are certainly some who have been interested in legislation, that length of service in the House and in the Senate is what gives influence.

I've got five years of experience as a national security staffer in the U.S. Congress.

I have represented farmers in federal court during the Iowa farm crisis. A farmer from Butler County. I don't think Sen. Grassley had that life experience. It's just a simple difference of who we are and where we've come from.

Having served as the majority spokesman for the House Ways and Means Committee after Republicans took the House in 1994, I've seen the promise and the peril of divided government before.

I'm a businessman. I'm a former legislator, and I'm an executive. And I've been very effective in each one of those positions.

I think this is a part of John McCain that a lot of people don't know about, is that he took younger senators under his wing. And, in my case, I - he taught me so much about national security and foreign policy, even when we didn't always agree. He took me four times with him to Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is therefore not to be wondered at that Lincoln's single term in the House of Representatives at Washington added practically nothing to his reputation.

I was on the elections committee in my last session in the state House of Representatives.

This is my fourth term and my seventh year. My first year was in 1997, the same year for Vic Snyder. It is still exciting to be there even though Washington is not run by Democrats right now, but we are working very hard.

It has been a tremendous privilege to serve the people of Utah during my time in the United States House of Representatives, but my time in the House should not be the sum total of my service.