Nancy Pelosi Quotes

The people have the right to know what their Agents are doing or have done, and it should not be in the option of the Legislature to conceal their proceedings.

If one of my colleagues wants to block a bill, they should stand up in front of the American people and explain why.

The Senate floor is and always has been the great arena of our democracy. I spent eight years in my younger life as a boxer, and sometimes when I enter the chamber, I think, 'This is the ring. The American people can see us here and listen to our arguments. This is where the fights matter.'

The Senate must stop doing so much of its business in secret, behind closed doors…. A bill that affects the nation’s security has been held up for months by a secret hold and cannot see the light of day…. There is no accountability…. The person who exercises a hold ought to be identified…. Secret holds have been the bane of the United States Senate for decades. So much for sunshine in the United States Senate.

What is the value of bringing a bill to the floor without the members having an opportunity to read it.

If everyone in government would refuse to sign everything they couldn't read, everything would grind to a screeching halt.

Getting something through the House is only half the battle. So you put things in the House bill that you know will be taken out in conference and you leave things out of the House bill that will be in the Senate bill. It's like a chess game.

Legislatures now pass statutes because of, not despite, their lack of clarity. By using vague language, legislators can avoid making the difficult political choices that they have to confront when drafting a statute precisely.

I would like to add some legislative history at the end of my remarks.

Public business in the United State Senate should be done in the public.

Politicians quickly learn to pacify the liberals by passing laws and regulations which, to pacify the conservatives, would not be enforced.

Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant.

Every time there's an institutional issue like impeachment, there's concern from the outside about what will happen.

We shouldn't have to pass a bill to find out what's in it.

On the Sandy bill, I did the best I could on waste, fraud and abuse, and then when the final bill comes, you don't say, 'Hell, no' because you didn't get everything you want in there.

So I think there's going to be a constituent backlash against this thing soon, as they see it moving in that direction...Whether they can pass something before the American public wakes up, I don't know.

I'm not sure we will have every single Democrat ... but we want a large number of Republicans to be able to vote for this bill because we think that will encourage the House not only to move forward but to pass a bill.

There are two things nobody should ever have to watch being made, sausage and laws.

If the bill remains what it is now, I will not be able to support a cloture motion before final passage. Therefore I will try to stop the passage of the bill.

Congress and the White House are working out their scheme for pushing through a healthcare 'reform' bill that has more pages than the U.S. Constitution has words. I guarantee you that not a single member of the House or Senate has a complete understanding of that legislation any more than they understood all the implications of the USA PATRIOT Act back in 2001.

Here's my proposal, which is based on the TV show Survivor: We put the entire Congress on an island. All the food on this island is locked inside a vault, which can be opened only by an ordinary American taxpayer named Bob. Every day, the congresspersons are given a section of the Tax Code, which they must rewrite so that Bob can understand it. If he can, he lets them eat that day; if he can't, he doesn't.

The Democratic line is that the Republican House does nothing but block and oppose. In fact, it has passed hundreds of bills only to have them die upon reaching the desk of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He has rendered the Senate inert by simply ensuring that any bill that might present a politically difficult vote for his Democratic colleagues never even comes to the floor.

Press releases tell us when federal agencies do something right, but the Freedom of Information Act lets us know when they do not.

I believe the president wants this bill, and I know he's taken some steps to bring it about, ... The reality is that with a majority of the members of the House ready to vote for this bill, the speaker refused to call a roll call.

When the wind is right, a faint odor of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.