Will Rogers Quotes
Congress is deadlocked and can’t act.
Carter, Joseph H. The Quotable Will Rogers. Gibbs Smith, 2005.
In response to Administration tactics to delay a vote on the Church-Cooper proposal to limit American involvement in Cambodia after June 30, 1970, Senator Cotton asserted:
Conservatives in the Senate were filibustering the bill at the time.
Referring to the Senate's right to ratify treaties and the effect on negotiations,
His Republican Party had filibustered more bills in the Senate then had been done previously in all of the Senate History together. Congress passed fewer bills in his first two years than any other Congress in history.
The congressman was reacting to a group staging a protest on the bridges connecting Washington DC with Virginia, thereby stopping traffic.
In 2007 the Republicans, who were in the minority, began to use the filibuster to a degree that it had never been used. Within the single year of 2007 Republican’s filibustered 62 times, doubling the highest rate that had occurred before. A small minority of senators were able to block legislation that easily passed the House and was supported by the majority of senators and in some cases supported by the overwhelming majority of the American Public.
In the early years of the Obama Administration, the minority leader of the Senate declared that the object of the Republicans in the Senate was to prevent Obama from being reelected. Therefore, the Republicans used the filibuster to block virtually all legislation. In 2010, the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives and would not pass any legislation that the President favored lest he get credit for accomplishing something. It had gotten so bad, that even when the President proposed Republican ideas about which everyone agreed, that too was blocked.
The Republicans in the previous decades had gone so far to the right and were so opposed to anything the government might do, that they could not support anything that might be constructive for the country if it might look like the Government was capable of something positive. They accomplished almost nothing as a result, and the nation was gridlocked.
William Penn Adair Rogers was an American stage and film actor, vaudeville performer, cowboy, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator from Oklahoma. He was a Cherokee citizen born in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory.
