Evan Bayh 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.

Someday a political genius will come along and make the Senate work.

You run Washington DC though the House. The Senate gets in the way. The President gets in the way.

The Senate's role is to advise and consent. Very little advice has been sought and consent has thus been a problem.

The Senate was designed not to be efficient. If was designed to slow things down, And it does a pretty good job of it.

The House Republicans are not the enemy, they’re the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.

We [Congress] are proving inadequate not only to our most difficult problems but also to routine duties. Our national political campaigns never stop. We seem convinced that majorities exist to impose their will with few concessions and that minorities exist to prevent the party in power from doing anything important. […] That’s not how we were meant to govern. Our entire system of government — with its checks and balances, its bicameral Congress, its protections of the rights of the minority — was designed for compromise.

Redistricting and a broken, polarized Congress have made it tough to be a moderate in Congress.

It used to be that Democrats and Republicans would disagree, but they could be social to each other. There were times during the year that we acted together in the good of the country.

You need the House, you need the Senate and you need the administration. And absent one of them, you're not going to get a heck of a lot done.

The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders and the early leaders of the republic who wanted a single house which was based on popular sovereignty representing the people and those founders who wanted two houses, the upper house, the Senate, being the more aristocratic.

When you work in the United States Senate, and you are around people of all different ideas and beliefs, you realize that what our Founding Fathers did that was so genius, is that they made the Senate the place where compromises are supposed to happen because of the makeup of the Senate.

It's one of the few regrets of my presidency - that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There's no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I'll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.

The Senate as an institution is broken. We're not doing the work of the American people and the rules are being abused. The only way to get us back to the traditions where the Senate is doing the work of the American people is to change the rules.

When I arrived in the Senate, the moderate so-called Rockefeller Republicans held the balance of power.

Senate: A body of elderly gentlemen charge with high duties and misdemeanors.

American politics is not, as is that of Europe, "a prelude to civil war"; it cannot become either entirely irresponsible or entirely dogmatic; and it must not try to be logical. It is a rocking sea of checks and balances in which uncompromising absolutes must drown.

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.

The Senate is indeed a deliberative body, and that quality serves the nation well. A slow-moving government helps us maintain a stable government. But slow moving is not the same as immobile.

Senators are a Constitutional impediment to the smooth functioning of staff.

The filibuster is the most important check on raw Presidential power.

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

Any legislation that is passed by one political party can be reversed by the other party. The only way to produce lasting legislation in America is bipartisanship. Without it, there is no sustainablity.

Though she is a proud native of one of the most famously liberal cities in the country, Feinstein has earned a reputation over the years in the Senate as someone eager to work across the aisle with Republicans.

It's important to remember that whatever the presidential candidates of either party say, they will have to interact with the United States Congress, particularly the Senate, when it comes to crafting policy... we play an important role. And I'm going to continue to play that role, whoever is president.