Stuart Rothenberg Quotes

We have a two-party system: The Democratic Party, which is a party of no ideas, and the Republican Party, which is a party of bad ideas.

When it comes to conservative social issues, it saddens me when sometimes my fellow Republicans duck and cover in the face of pressure from the left. Our loudest opponents on the left are never going to like us so let's quit trying to curry favor with them.

I see the demographics increasing, and by that I mean the notion of social acceptance is growing, not decreasing; I think the notion of fiscal responsibility is growing, not decreasing. And Republicans seem to be moving further away from those two categories than closer.

While their fiscal views aren't mine, the moderates are the last reasonable voice in the current Republican Party.

Republican politics have been off-kilter for several years now because a large segment of the conservative base does not look back fondly on the Bush presidency.

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 think if you look all across the country, the so-called Blue Dogs are all gone to kennel. There are no more Blue Dogs, they're called Republicans. People would rather elect consistently conservative Republicans than Blue Dogs, who are only conservative when it's convenient.

Democrats' attack on the Republican majority leader is nothing but a coordinated agenda to stop an effective leader from accomplishing the people's business.

I think I'm becoming a psychologist in explaining the Republican Party. It's the only way you can explain 'em. It's psychological.

'2016' is based on an experiment: what if you let Obama do it himself? That experiment is necessarily limited because I'm not factoring in a Republican House, a Supreme Court or the tug of public opinion.

During the Obama years, the Republicans have done an unprecedented amount of stonewalling on cabinet-and-below appointees. I would also argue that their war on judicial nominees has been way beyond what went before. Really, if the president nominated God to serve on the D.C. Court of Appeals, Mitch McConnell would threaten a filibuster.

You used to get legislation done by getting the moderates to agree. But we have no moderates now so it doesn’t get done

The middle in Congress is gone now. That is where we got most things done.

The Republicans, specifically those of the House of Representatives, are responsible for undermining the confidence of the public that Government can help people.

I wasn't looking for a hobby. If I were looking for a hobby, it wouldn't be the United States Senate. That's one of the toughest jobs I'd probably ever do. I just felt there wasn't enough compromise going on: People were too far to the left, too far to the right, with no one trying to build a compromise.

Concerned about re-election, interest-group reactions, the media, or fundraising, many legislators have found it in their interest to refuse to cooperate with members of the opposing party - or to treat them as enemies in some kind of war, in which the whole point is to defeat and humiliate them. But the American people have been the real losers.

Where I underestimated the opposition was how willing Republicans in Congress would be to put their short-term political interests ahead of what they knew was good for their country. That was extremely disappointing.

Any Republican who says he can work with Hillary Clinton is a traitor to the nation.

What worries me is that conservative thought is moving quickly, but we're kind of the pachyderms in Congress because things move so slowly.

The Democratic Party has become the party of the coastal elite, and the Republican Party is the party of the working class and that average American citizen who's been struggling over the past eight years with Obama in the White House.

Jon Tester's priorities are with the liberal, extreme minority of Democrats in the Senate unwilling to compromise. He does not have Montana's best interests in mind. He has failed to represent Montanans.

The reality is, the Republicans in Massachusetts are irrelevant and they're in collusion with the Democrats.

I am very glad that Paul Ryan left the government as a capitulating supplicant to Donald Trump while the government was shut down, while the debt hit record levels, right? Every single thing Paul Ryan claimed to care about.

The people who started the American government, the founders of the Constitution, didn't like political parties but they were forced to start them. Nobody ever created political parties in England, they evolved. And there do tend to be two general tendencies that focus around how much government you think you need.

Government shutdowns do not actually become what the term implies. Two-thirds of the government cannot shut down. We're only talking about the third of government that's discretionary spending, and even at that, nobody loses their jobs, and nobody loses their Thanksgiving turkey. The whole thing has resulted from the Republican Party thinking they bought the farm back in 1995.