Earl Blumenauer Quotes

From the moment Donald Trump was inaugurated, Washington Democrats have been myopically focused on politically targeting his administration and impeaching him.

Democrats, for their part, have chosen to go the way of reckless obstruction, pursuing the first partisan impeachment in history.

When elected officials and others contribute to a climate and culture that fosters hyper-partisanship, we've got to blow the whistle.

I don’t chose my friends and associates on the basis of political party. The Senate has become altogether too nasty.

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.

The polarization of Congress; the decline of civility; and the rise of attack politics in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early years of the new century are a blot on our political system and a disservice to the American people.

I think that Barack Obama faces a level of divisiveness, and I don't mean on a national level in terms of the North and the South and the Civil War; I really mean just politically.

There does seem to be in the U.S. now an ideology and an entrenchment that has stopped people doing what they are hired to do, which is govern rather than run for office the whole time.

There's very little reason in politics these days.

The Congress is a dysfunctional institution; it's broken. One of our three branches of government is broken.

We have moved toward a kind of scorpions-in-a-bottle Government where you have two branches [executive and legislative] that don't understand many of the legitimate needs of the other branch.

Congress doesn’t do comprehensive well.

Divided government need not be dysfunctional government.

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

Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there's no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters. But I don't think so.

Congress actively undermines the best of legislative practice.

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

Many good people serve in Congress. They are patriotic, hard-working, and devoted to the public good as they see it, but the institutional and cultural impediments to change frustrate the intentions of these well-meaning people as rarely before.

The question of impeaching Donald Trump is about replacing the toxic partisanship of today's Republican party with America's traditional rule of law. It has become a constitutional imperative.

I'm pretty happy not to be an insider anymore. There's just no common ground. I don't know if it's distrust or that the politics is substantially more partisan than the public. But there's no pressure to make a grand bargain on fiscal matters, on growth, on anything.

I think it's a time to be sad about what's been done to the United States Senate, the greatest deliberative body in the world.

I think partisanship is probably the greatest problem in Washington, D.C.

There's a lot of bipartisan rancor, a lot of excessive delegation of legislative power from the legislative branch to the executive branch.

There are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far.