Will Hurd Quotes

If you really want to get something done in Washington, it has to be done in a bi-Partisan way.

Nearly all legislation is the result of compromise.

Obamacare is the wildly complex Rube Goldberg contraption it is because getting the legislation through Congress required so many political tradeoffs and so many unavoidable deals with so many vested interests. But that's no excuse.

You need the House, you need the Senate and you need the administration. And absent one of them, you're not going to get a heck of a lot done.

One of the tragedies of the Bush administration is that we went back to business as usual, make a deal with the Democrats, let's all be friends in Washington philosophy.

I have an ability to work collegially across a wide range of interests in the caucus and in the Congress, and an ability to work on a bipartisan basis. Appropriators pride themselves on that.

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.

One of the things I give Nancy Pelosi a lot of credit for is that she's able to get things passed and hold her members together because she shows us that she's doing everything possible to get our views into these bills.

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.

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

How few aim at the good of the whole, without aiming too much at the prosperity of the parts!

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

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.

In campaigning, you want to slay your opponent. In governing, you want to make love to your opponent.

Deals, flattery, threats and promises are part of the process, certainly; do not flinch from any opportunity to scheme and plot, however sordid and demeaning it may appear.

My Republican compatriots do not feel that people ought to work with Democrats across the aisle—Compromise is a bad word.

In the art of governing you have to almost make love to your opponents and say “No” to some of your fiercest supporters. In campaigning it’s the exact opposite.

Governing in a polarized society means, making bipartisan deals.

… triangulation is the idea that you demonstrate to some set of swing voters that you are politically palatable by poking the extremes of both parties in the eye.

You'll never get progress in Washington until you have a majority, bipartisan majority, that really wants to solve problems.

The way I've gotten things done is by working with Democrats and Republicans. I worked with Jay Rockefeller, for example, on highway safety issues.

The government was built on compromising. And it's frustrating as hell.

When we do our legislation, we're not trying to figure out, 'How can I use this to run against you?' We say, 'How can we pass this bill to help both of our constituents?'

Especially in the whip operation, you're in constant contact with the members and their chiefs of staff, so having a chief who's approachable and reaches out to other chiefs so people know what's going - know what they're looking for in the policy that comes to the House floor - is incredibly important.

Congress has been productive when focusing on bites of policy that don't inflame the divisions within the party and quietly do the work of governing.