Steve Chabot Quotes

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.

Eliminating the filibuster would eliminate the people’s voices in the Senate.

The middle in Congress is gone now. That is where we got most things done.

The history of Congress shows that once parliamentary tools become big enough obstacles for the majority party, they are abolished or reformed.

If the Senate can't perform its most basic responsibilities, I worry about how we're going to make the tough decisions and do the hard work that will be necessary to get our country on a path to fiscal solvency.

Few believe Democrats will control both houses of Congress in 2021, and even if they manage to, Republicans will still be around to play spoiler on plenty of big agenda items.

What happens in the Senate is the Republicans sink to the lowest common denominator.

So the - the part of the problem is not just the rhetoric. It's the fact that we - we're so polarized in what we've done to each other as parties over the last thirty years in redistricting that it's very, very hard to overcome your own constituencies and move to the middle.

Some of my colleagues seem more interested in using every procedural method possible to keep the Senate from doing anything than they are in creating jobs or helping Americans struggling in a difficult economy.

A lot of the Republicans wanted exactly what Barack Obama wanted, exactly what Nancy Pelosi wanted, exactly what Harry Reid wanted, which is to raise the debt ceiling, but they wanted to be able to tell what they view as their foolish, gullible constituents back home they didn't do it.

We shouldn't deny the right of the minority to filibuster, but we need to do a much better job of making them own it. That way, the American people could figure out who is being obstructionist and who is willing to compromise.

I'm interested in being part of a majority in the Senate.

I never heard the word 'compromise' used. So I'm starting to believe that these terms only come into play to try and force Republicans to do what the Democrats want.

Democrats can neither control nor predict whether our GOP counterparts are really ready to play chicken with the U.S. economy. But we can assure the American people that our party takes the nation's faith and credit seriously.

The best thing to hold down spending is to have a Democratic President and a Republican Congress.

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.

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.

The majority in the Senate is prepared to restore the Senate's traditions and precedents to ensure that regardless of party, any president's judicial nominees, after full and fair debate, receive a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

I found, in the Senate, you can have significant impact whether you're in the minority party or the majority party, and a lot of it goes back to... that you really have to be able to count to 60.

The Left has been frustrated because President Obama has allowed the Republicans to run all over him.

Holding Congressional hearings is the purview of the majority, and during the first years of the Obama administration, Democrats could not be bothered.

There's never a perfect bipartisan bill in the eyes of a partisan.

Unfortunately, the Senate Democrats have become an extreme party. They have become a party that has abdicated their responsibilities. Under Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats, we have a do-nothing Senate.

Senate Republicans have engaged in a record number of filibusters and other obstructionist tactics.

Today, Democrats not only have the White House; they have the Senate too. So we have to be realistic about what we can and cannot achieve, while at the same recognizing that realism should never be confused with capitulation.