Legislative Obstacles Quotes

I'm a legislator, but it's hard to legislate when my party's out of power.

I think reconciliation is Obama's goal - but the fight with the Republicans is like a fight with pit bulls, they never let go. Even worse, now the Republicans feel they can keep pushing and he will keep giving. They have not seen a stiff resistance on his part.

President Obama can talk about having no grand schemes and making no big gains, but the reality is he can't get anything of significance through Congress.

A lot of what is preventing us from getting things done on the federal level is that there is too much influence from special interests over members of Congress.

Every Republican is on record as saying Obamacare is unacceptable, intolerable, and they're gonna do everything they could to keep it from happening. But, at the moment of truth, they're not.

I was told freshman Republicans don't get their bills heard.

I think raising wages, investing in infrastructure, making sure that people have access to good educations that equip them for the jobs of the future. Those are all agenda items that would help alleviate some of those economic pressures and dislocations that people are experiencing. The problem was I couldn't convince the Republican Congress to pass a lot of them.

Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils, bribery corrupts them, personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise, so as to prove to every practical man, that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal

Once an entitlement program has been created with millions of beneficiaries, it becomes almost impossible to repeal.

Talking to my Senate Republican colleagues about climate change is like talking to prisoners about escaping. The conversations are often private, even furtive.

McCain was so passionate and determined, but he was also practical. He understood what a heavy lift it was to get a 60-vote, filibuster-proof margin on something that lawmakers feared would hurt their ability to campaign to keep their jobs.

We're not going to let some unelected bureaucrats in Washington stop us from moving forward with our agenda, but at the end of the day, CBO is not the Holy Grail.

Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.

The history of Congress shows that once parliamentary tools become big enough obstacles for the majority party, they are abolished or reformed.

What most surprises me about Brazil is the extent of the difficulties that we create for ourselves. We create a lot of legislation to control the Brazilian state itself, that this ends up meaning that things don't go with the speed any head of government would like.

Millennial voters are very concerned about climate change and will vote for candidates who are planning to address it. But the systems that are in place - people talk about gerrymandering and the money that's in politics, this is a real thing, a real effect - and it's hard for climate change-denying legislators to get voted out. But I predict it will happen.

Redistricting and a broken, polarized Congress have made it tough to be a moderate in Congress.

President Obama came up with tremendous ideas, but he was blocked by the Republicans.

I became more set than ever in my distrust of those men, whether businessmen or lawyers, judges, legislators or executive officers, who seek to make the Constitution a fetish for the prevention of the work of social reform..