Elizabeth Emken Quotes

As I've learned in my time in the state legislature, important legislation is always a work in progress.

I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done.

You have to have patience to be a legislator.

Ultimately, Congressional medicine is like veterinary medicine: It must be strong enough to work, and tasty enough to swallow.

I'm a good legislator. I'm a bad some other things.

Politics doesn't matter, policy does.

When you are President you have to get something done, and that often means compromise.

You've got to have a theme if you're going to get Congress to do something difficult.

The way you get anything done in the Congress is through coalitions.

Nearly all legislation is the result of compromise.

We have a constitution that says that the way you get things is by passing legislation, not by threatening to destroy the country unless you get your way.

Legislation is the art of compromise.

Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, and Clinton passed legislation because they understood and appreciated the difficult political process. They fought for their principles yet recognized the need for compromise to get anything done.

I do politics in order to do policy.

Good ideas are the backbone of good government.

If at the end of May we don't, we'll reform, regroup, decide how we're going to go about it, but if the task force can't come up with the bill, I'm going to push mine, and go ahead and make the changes in it that we've been working on now for a year or two and just go for it.

I think there's a lot to learn from Rockefeller on how to pass legislation.

I'll sign anything except bad legislation.

The art of politics is knowing what to do next.

You do the policy, I'll do the politics.

Speaker Newt Gingrich has appointed a task force, which I'm on, and over the next couple months the task force is going to try to come up with legislation that does what we're all trying to do. I feel pretty good about the members that are on the task force.

If you look through history, all of the great work we've done in Congress has been around a table of compromise, when it comes to the most difficult problems.

Public policy has been a passion of mine. For three decades, I've had some involvement in the political process.

I know how to make sausage, and now that I've seen how laws are made, I'll stick with sausage.

The dominant color of politics is gray; difficult choices and compromise are required at almost every step of the journey toward a major new program.