Mark Shields Quotes

Congress doesn’t do comprehensive well.

Congress actively undermines the best of legislative practice.

Congress has lost its capacity to manage itself.

[Describing Congress:] We generally lounge or squabble the greater part of the session, and crowd into a few days of the last of the term three or four times the business done during as many preceding months.

The frustration of the Senate is that it's slow. It looks like an aquarium.

Everyone in Washington knows what needs to be done. They just don’t do it because there’s always someone else they can blame.

We need less bipartisanship in Congress.

Congress is good at two things: Doing nothing and over-reacting.

Many times, the Senate talks of things and never gets anything through.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

You can see how dysfunctional this Congress is.

For most governors, we find the United States Senate or the United States Congress very frustrating at the slow pace in which they act. There doesn't seem to be a lot of discipline and organization to what they do.

The U. N. is like a company that can't market its products and whose board members put their own interests first.

Delay has the odor of the Beltway.

We have a lame-duck Congress, we have a lame-duck administration, we have a lame-duck Secretary of Defense, all of whom support this legislation. If we do not pass this bill and allow these [military] base closures to be named this year, it will be another 10 years before such an opportunity comes again.

We'll wait forever before the United Nations does anything.

The United Nations is an indispensable but deeply flawed institution.

There were two unpleasant surprises. One was the inertia of Congress, the length of time it takes to get a complicated piece of legislation through ... and the other was the irresponsibility of the press..

We have a level of obstruction and an abuse of the Senate rules that we have never had before… We have a dysfunctional Senate. Some say it’s a broken Senate.

I hate to tell you, but it's not always pretty up there on Capitol Hill

Watching Congress is like being in permanent divorce court

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

If you're not comfortable with delay, frustration and impatience, get out of the Senate. It's the nature of the institution, but I think we've taken it to an art form.

Overall, Congress is dysfunctional, partisan, and polarized, and it isn’t getting anything done. We need commissions to break out of divisive partisanship.

Congress has the Constitutional responsibility to deal with the problem and Congress punted.