Senate Procedure Quotes

The filibuster is the most important check on raw Presidential power.

Let the filibuster be no more. Let the people decide.

Voting for a candidate for the DC circuit is very different from confirming someone to the US Supreme Court. I have been very clear that the Senate should not confirm any nominee in a lame duck session.

I don't know anyone who voted today [in the Senate] who knew what he was voting on.

This has not been a legislative process worthy of the Senate. Members of the Judiciary Committee, as I just said, were implored to save their amendments for the floor. Then, when we got here, we were told no amendments could be accepted.

Eliminating the filibuster would eliminate the people’s voices in the Senate.

We've seen filibusters to block judicial nominations, jobs bills, political transparency, ending Big Oil subsidies - you name it, there's been a filibuster.

Reconciliation is a special budget procedure to change entitlement and tax laws. It cannot be filibustered and requires only a simple majority in the Senate to be passed. It is primarily intended for deficit and mandatory spending reduction.

Now, for this book I had to learn the world of the Senate, which is really for all that's written about the Senate, an unknowing world and its mores, and the way things work with subcommittees and all. I loved learning about that.

I firmly believe the Senate should see more voting and debate and less standing around and waiting for backroom deals.

My view of the filibuster is either you've got to lower vote edge or make people really filibuster if they feel that seriously about a piece of legislation.

If you read the Senate rules, there are provisions where the Senate parliamentarian can be overridden.

Anybody who get easily frustrated should not be in the United States Senate. We operate by unanimous consent …. Any Senator can stop the train.

What has the filibuster become? The filibuster has become a tool for slowing everything down…a tool by which one senator who announces that his object is to impose gridlock on the Senate, can do so.

No one ever built the filibuster rule. It just kind of was created.

About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.

Advice and consent does not mean rubber stamp in the Senate.

[A] Senator who wants to stir up trouble ... can do so by introducing on the floor amendments which he was duty bound to present in committee. But presentation in committee makes no headlines.

And the president is all wrong when he maintains that a nominee should have an up-or-down vote. The Constitution doesn't say that. The Constitution doesn't say that that nominee shall have any vote at all. There doesn't have to even be a vote.

When you use the word 'filibuster,' most of us in America - and I count myself among them - envision it as the ability to hold the floor on rare occasions to speak at length and make your point emphatically and even delay progress by taking hours.

He (Cato) never gave his opinion in the Senate upon any other point whatever, without adding these words, "And, in my opinion Carthage should be destroyed." ["Delenda est Carthago."]

When President Donald Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to serve on the Supreme Court, I said that he deserved a fair hearing and a vote. I said this even though Senate Republicans filibustered dozens of President Obama's judicial nominees and then stopped President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland.

Cloture is simply cutting off debate.

It is not nothing to ask someone holding an election certificate in the United States Senate to provide his or her vote.

Nobody claims that every treaty is entitled to an up or down vote. Nobody claims that every proposed law is entitled to an up or down vote. Why is a judicial nomination entitled to an up or down vote? The Constitution gives the complete power to the Senate to set its own rule.