Quotes About Senate

While it's true that Washington would benefit from more civility, the Senate, behind the scenes, is an extraordinarily collegial institution.

I had always heard that Mitch McConnell was a master legislator and a true loyalist to this institution. But in the 18 months I've been in the Senate, what I've seen is an astonishingly limited vision for what the Senate can and should accomplish. What a waste.

Look, all this is about is utilizing the rules of the Senate, using a majority of the senators, to make sure that we get health reform done. We cannot wait another day.

It is plain that, when it comes to inferior officers, Congress itself can pass a law sending these nominees to the President with him having the authority to put them on the bench without the advice and consent of the Senate.

I must say I am not pleased to have to arrange the Senate schedule around the availability of Senators who are running for President.

It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.

In 1947, the year Clinton was born, there were no women serving in the Senate.

I'm proud to serve on the Senate Agriculture Committee.

One of things I have always been open to is making policy in the Senate Commerce Committee.

I like the House. The House is where you can effect the most change. It's such a fast-moving dynamic body compared to the Senate.

A majority of senators should be able to adopt rules at the beginning of each Congress.

I will always support a vote. The constitution gives the president the right to appoint justices with the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate does have the right to say no; they do not have the right to say nothing.

The Senate could use more people who had to sweat for a living and fewer of the politicians who made this mess.

Anne Richard, a senior U.S. State Department official, testified at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing in November 2015 that any Syrian refugee trying to get into the United States is scrutinized by officials from the National Counterterrorism Center, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department and Pentagon.

I am proud to be in the Senate. I have always been proud to be a part of our political system. It is a remarkable privilege to participate in this system of ours.

Emperor Claudius, the story goes, once convoked the Senate to vote on whether corned beef and cabbage was the best of all possible dinner dishes.

The fact was, the Senate's "advise and consent" was intended, from the start, to forestall the President from remaking the Court in his image. The Senate had, for most of its two hundred years, scrutinized the philosophy and politics of nominees—not just their competence, or honesty. And when a President picked a justice for reasons of ideology, it was the Senate's duty to examine that ideology.

Great is the power, great is the authority of a senate that is unanimous in its opinions.

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.

The threat to change Senate rules is a raw abuse of power and will destroy the very checks and balances our founding fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government.

You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.

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

Even the streamlined patent-reform bill before the Senate is significantly controversial. Some estimate the reform could create as many as 2 million jobs, but when you look under the covers, there does not appear to be any support for this. And small businesses, corporations, and individual inventors are significantly opposed."

A first bill for the abolition of compulsory student union fees failed in 2004 but it was back as soon as the government won control of the Senate.