Billy Long Quotes

The 113th Congress has spent much of the year doing nothing but collecting campaign contributions …

All you have to do is look at Congress’s approval ratings. It’s normal that it’s low. It’s not normal that it is 9 percent or 11 percent or 13 percent. We’ve given up our legitimacy. Legitimacy is about being honest on the issues, not being partisan.

I've had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should. There is much too much partisanship and not enough progress.

The politics of partisanship and the resulting inaction and excuses have paralyzed decision-making, primarily at the federal level, and the big issues of the day are not being addressed, leaving our future in jeopardy.

Washington has become a place where good ideas come to die.

Our Congress makes the UN look efficient by comparison

Congress has lost its capacity to manage itself.

Congress is more broken than ever. Congressman Will Hurd has quickly become part of the problem.

Congress seems to be very good at doing nothing.

Congress is unable to do the work of the American people because too many politicians believe that compromise means capitulation.

Many times, the Senate talks of things and never gets anything through.

Congress may not get the Internet, but the Internet doesn't get Congress, either.

Politicians are never going to turn this country around. Our country's a mess. The politicians are going to destroy this country. They're weak and they're ineffective.

A Senator of the United States … serves his people by joining in the petty squabbles that occupy so much time of the Senate today. I may have grown cynical from long service, but this is a tendency I do not like, and I sometimes think I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years and listen to it.

You can always depend on Congress to overreact.

[Referring to Congress:] ... those assholes on the Hill.

[Describing Congress:] We generally lounge or squabble the greater part of the session, and crowd into a few days of the last of the term three or four times the business done during as many preceding months.

While Washington's establishment ... is whipped into motion by the mere whiff of an emotional issue or scandal, there is no reward in today's Capitol for fixing the broken mechanics of government or solving the huge problems that haunt us.

Congress doesn’t do comprehensive well.

Congress is lazy.

Has Washington become so dysfunctional that even when we all agree on something, we can’t get it done?

Federal governments and even state governments within countries have basically been immobilized by conflicting interests, by conflicting views of what science is, and the inability to lead. They are immobilized because they don’t want to take tough votes and alienate half of the constituency.

Congress members put their ideology ahead of your prosperity.

Talking heads will chatter, argue, and rant on TV and in the houses of Congress but that's all they will do. Weeks and months will go by in which the crowning achievement of Congress may be little more than perhaps passing a bill to declare National Eat Your Spinach Week (sponsored, of course, by the Spinach Growers of America).

Congress actively undermines the best of legislative practice.