Robert Caro Quotes

There's a learning curve to understanding how the Senate operates.

In the Senate, where 60 votes are required to do anything important, you have to work with your colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

What happens is that, you know, on Mondays, at least in the Senate, you know, Monday night we'd have what you'd call a bed-check vote. Just to get, you know, the machinery of the Senate up and running so they can start the committee process; on Tuesday morning, things go. By Thursday, you know, jet fumes, the smell of jet fumes.

Being a freshman Senator, you spend your first 18 months just trying to find out how the Senate works.

This has not been a legislative process worthy of the Senate. Members of the Judiciary Committee, as I just said, were implored to save their amendments for the floor. Then, when we got here, we were told no amendments could be accepted.

I find it very difficult to see a scenario where financial regulation doesn't pass the Senate.

I'm president of the Senate. I'm not a neophyte when it comes to understanding political alignments and misalignments.

I mean, if you go back to 1960 on major pieces of legislation, the filibuster was used about eight percent of the time.

I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale.

Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the United States Senate, he made the Senate work.

One of the reasons that the Senate was structured and founded the way it is, as opposed to the House, it was designed for gridlock. It was designed to stop massive new laws being passed and voted on daily. It was designed to stop the growth of government.

Reconciliation is a special budget procedure to change entitlement and tax laws. It cannot be filibustered and requires only a simple majority in the Senate to be passed. It is primarily intended for deficit and mandatory spending reduction.

Advice and consent does not mean rubber stamp in the Senate.

For a long time in American history, people didn't even come up before the Senate. They didn't come before the Judiciary Committee, and up until about 1923, something like that.

Look, all this is about is utilizing the rules of the Senate, using a majority of the senators, to make sure that we get health reform done. We cannot wait another day.

A typical day in the Senate requires several trips to the Senate floor and back, although the journey is usually underground so that on some days, once I arrive at work, I never see the sun.

Just as we cool our coffee at the breakfast table we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it

Nobody claims that every treaty is entitled to an up or down vote. Nobody claims that every proposed law is entitled to an up or down vote. Why is a judicial nomination entitled to an up or down vote? The Constitution gives the complete power to the Senate to set its own rule.

In the course of time, each committee is to a large degree co-opted by a department of government ... The committee becomes an advocate of the program over which it has authority, and goes to the House of the Senate as an advocate.

Anyone who works in the Senate is often in doubt as to the will of the Senate.

The Vice President breaks ties in the Senate. In our 200 years of history there have been about 200 ties broken so you can see what an important job it is.

What has the filibuster become? The filibuster has become a tool for slowing everything down…a tool by which one senator who announces that his object is to impose gridlock on the Senate, can do so.

Anybody who get easily frustrated should not be in the United States Senate. We operate by unanimous consent …. Any Senator can stop the train.

Let the filibuster be no more. Let the people decide.

The major role of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is not legislative; it is educational.