Luis Gutierrez Quotes

Don't count on Congress. Laws come into being because people on the ground demand it.

It is very difficult to get legislation passed. But then the danger always is that you have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.

What Congress does is respond to pressures that are upon it.

I've seen senators, whose character and intelligence I know reasonably well, vote a certain way just because staff tells them to.

You cannot make elected officials … do what they will not do.

If there be any real support among the people for such a constitutional amendment, it is so small that not even one person has been able to get himself a job as a lobbyist to come before the Congress and try to have it pass the joint resolution.

Bureaucrats understand who their real masters are. Their real masters are not their nominal department heads. The real powers are the chairmen on Capitol Hill.

Those most adjacent to the seat of legislation will always possess advantages over others.

Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils, bribery corrupts them, personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise, so as to prove to every practical man, that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal

The lobbyists are a kind of permanent other government.

It used to be that your ability to become a chairman of a major committee depended on seniority, what you knew about the subject, and your skill as a legislator, and not it depends on how much money you raise for the party leadership.

Public opinion is very important in the United States. It affects the way Congress deals with issues.

Presidents are evaluated not by what they did by the stroke of their own pen; it's what they persuade Congress to do.

I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed.

Politicians move when the public requires them to move.

Dealing with politicians, that's a little different. But government doesn't change until people demand it.

To get Congress to do anything.

QUORUM, n. A sufficient number of members of a deliberative body to have their own way and their own way of having it. In the U.S. Senate a quorum consists of the chairman of the Committee on Finance and a messenger from the White House.

Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.

The days of pay-to-play politics is over.

I demonstrated through my work that I can rally other people to support legislation and get it passed.

My grandfather was a popular senator, known as an advocate for fiscal responsibility, including the line-item veto for the president.

A commission presenting evidence doesn't do a Jedi mind trick and make state legislators in some state suddenly pass a bill.

If we're going to come together and make real progress to improve the lives of people here in Maine and across the country, then we need new leadership. Because after 24 years in Washington, Sen. Collins has become part of that broken system, putting special interests and her political party first. And Mainers know it and feel it.

Our responsibility is to focus on the House. The Senate's the Senate.