Max Baucus Quotes
The Senate is a remarkable institution. It is unique. There is no other body, no other political body, no other democratic legislature in the world quite like the U.S. Senate.
Baucus, Max. "Farewell to the Senate." Congressional Record, vol. 160, no. 21, Government Printing Office, 4 Feb. 2014.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield. The “Second Chamber referred to the House of Lords—the upper house of the British Parliament. The notion in both England and the United States was that the upper house—the Senate in the US case—should be independent and not easily pressured or influenced by the passions and forces of the time. One believe has been that only the wealthy could be independent since people who were not wealthy would be more easily bribed or pressured by forces in the system like a political party. In England at the time, wealth and property were synonymous. In some notable cases in American politics, wealth leaders were very independent and served the society as a whole. Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy were very wealthy men. So was Abraham Lincoln who had made a great deal of money as a lawyer. Senators and Presidents in America and Members of the House of Lords in England have tended to be much more wealthy than average. Unfortunately, although there were great examples of wealthy independent politicians, many of the upper class have an insensitivity to average people and the poor. Further, they tend to have values and beliefs that are different from most people.
Originally published as The Cynic’s Word Book
The Senate had always been more deliberative than the House, but at the time Alexander made this statement, his party—the minority in the Senate—had filibustered most of all the legislation, There were more filibusters than had occurred in the entire pure history of America.
Maxwell Sieben Baucus is an American politician and diplomat who served as a United States Senator from Montana from 1978 to 2014. A member of the Democratic Party, he was a U.S. Senator for nearly 36 years, making him the longest-serving Senator in Montana history. President Barack Obama appointed Baucus to replace Gary Locke as the 11th U.S. Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, a position he held from 2014 until 2017.
