Legislative Legacy Quotes

I was involved in legislating dozens of laws, perhaps hundreds. But my glory didn't lie in legislative work, if there is any glory in it. The Israeli law books are full of laws that aren't enforced anyway.

I want to dig in before I finish with a career here in Congress - be known as someone who was a really serious legislator, who had really good ideas and was willing to work across the aisle to get broad consensus to solve some of these problems the country is facing.

Probably the most effective legislator we've ever had.

The legacy of the New Del was, more than anything else, a matter of ideological change. Henceforth, nearly everyone would look to the federal government for solutions to problems great and small, real and imagined, personal as well as social.

Sen. Sessions' commitment to public service is nearly unparalleled in Alabama history, and his departure from the Senate leaves tremendous shoes to fill.

The No Child Left Behind Act will be one of President Bush's enduring legacies. And it was engineered and inaugurated with a truly bipartisan coalition in Congress. Accountability, standards, and truly measuring student performance just makes sense. The only real debate about the law was and is whether or not it was adequately funded.

Immortality awaits the legislator fortunate enough to have a significant law named after him. Think of Pell grants or Stafford loans for students, Sarbanes-Oxley to regulate Wall Street, or the Hyde Amendment on abortions.

Wilbur Mills knows that he was chairman of Ways and Means before I got here and that he'll still be chairman after I've gone—and he knows I know it.

Each of us has these little desks that you can’t write anything on. But inside the drawer the names of the previous senators using that desk are carved in the wood.

Decisions that lawmakers made decades or even a century ago have essentially locked us into ways of doing things, as the cost of changing looms more heavily than the potential benefits of trying something different.