The Senate Quotes

The House Republicans are not the enemy, they’re the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.

The difference between being a member of the House and being a member of the Senate is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit.

On the same ground, and literally sitting among the senators, were a whole regiment of ladies, whispering, talking, laughing, and fidgeting… the whole thing was more irregular, and unbusiness-like than any one could have imagined …

A millionaire can buy a Senate seat just as he would buy an opera box or a yacht or any other luxury in which he can afford to indulge himself. In some instances the sale takes the form of open bribery of the legislators; more often the Senate seat was simply the satisfaction of a ‘claim’ acknowledged by the leaders of the party and created by large contributions to the party treasury.

The conspiracy is nearly completed. The Legislation of the Republic is in the hands of this handful of Slaveholders. The United States Senate assures it to them. The Executive power of the Government is theirs. Buchanan took the oath of fealty to them on the steps of the Capitol last Wednesday. The body which gives the supreme law of the land, has just acceded to their demands, and dared to declare that under the charter of the Nation, men of African descent are not citizens of the United States and can not be -- that the Ordinance of 1787 was void -- that human Slavery is not a local thing, but pursues its victims to free soil, clings to them wherever they go, and returns with them -- that the American Congress has no power to prevent the enslavement of men in the National Territories -- that the inhabitants themselves of the Territories have no power to exclude human bondage from their midst -- and that men of color can not be suitors for justice in the Courts of the United States!

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

We could beat back Kennedy on Civil Rights, but Lyndon [Johnson] knows how to beat us.

I certainly want to be the whip, and that's an election every two years in the Senate Democratic caucus.

In the Senate, I will defend the protections in the Affordable Care Act, and expand health care to more Americans.

Congress is almost totally dysfunctional right now. All we've done this year and my first year in the Senate ... is barely keep the doors open.

The caucus is not open to former Senators.

We [the Senate] are a small town of 100 people. It makes no sense to not get along with others.

That after the President shall be seated in his Chair and the Vice-President, Senators and Representatives shall be again seated, the Vice-President shall announce to the President that the members of both Houses will attend him to be present at his taking the Oath of Office required by the Constitution. To the end that the Oath of Office may be administered to the President in the most public manner, and that the greatest number of the people of the United States and without distinction, may be witnesses to the solemnity, that therefore the Oath be administered in the outer Gallery adjoining to the Senate Chamber.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan [is] easily the most original thinker in the Senate.

Most ex-Presidents would be glad to become ex-officio members of the Senate without a vote.

The thing is, if you control the Senate meetings, you control the gavel. And the gavel is a very important instrument... an instrument of power. An instrument that establishes the agenda.

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

Fierce nomination fights have been going on since the early days of the Republic …. The founding fathers wanted to avoid a monarchy and instead created anarchy.

The Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world which Congress would rather ignore ... Since the first day the Senate existed, it has always intrigued against the Secretary of State ...

I’m better speaking with my own voice. That is one of the reasons I left the Senate

A Senator is not God or a doctor.

The bogey of "entangling alliances" lurks in the corner of almost every treaty the Senate has had to consider in recent years.

I have no disposition to withhold any information which the duty of my station will permit, or the public good shall require to be disclosed: and in fact, all the Papers affecting the negotiation with Great Britain were laid before the Senate, when the Treaty itself was communicated for their consideration and advice

A committee of the Senate ought to confer with a committee of the President through a head of a department and not with the Chief Magistrate, for in the latter case a committee of that House is equal to the President.

I have voted in support of efforts in the Senate to enact a Constitutional amendment that would have limited marriage to one man and one woman only.