Steve Scalise Quotes

Our Keystone legislation received strong bipartisan support in the Senate. Although it didn't receive the 60 votes necessary for passage, 56 senators - a majority - voted in favor of the bill. Despite President Obama's actively lobbying against the bill, we still won the support of 11 Democrats.

I'm not sure we will have every single Democrat ... but we want a large number of Republicans to be able to vote for this bill because we think that will encourage the House not only to move forward but to pass a bill.

If I can't negotiate something that gets more than four Republicans, I'm not a very good representative of my party.

One of the things I give Nancy Pelosi a lot of credit for is that she's able to get things passed and hold her members together because she shows us that she's doing everything possible to get our views into these bills.

The role of the speaker of the House is to deliver enough votes by understanding and accommodating the individual bottom lines of enough members to pass the bill.

When Kennedy could not get the civil rights bill passed - and he was the big liberal - Lyndon Johnson came in and it got passed, and he was the conservative and the southerner. So sometimes in politics, to get something done, it takes a special kind of knowledge and a special kind of person, but it doesn't always follow the party lines.

Health care reform, the marquee legislative accomplishment of the Obama administration's first term, was passed before we entered the world of divided government.

I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.

As for life within a Legislature,— who can tell how warped and bent and twisted, and accommodated to the exigencies of party struggle become the faculties of belief?

It’s popular in Congress to vote for simplistic solutions to complex problems.

The Senate should not be a graveyard for good ideas.

My definition of bipartisanship is Democrats agreeing with Republicans

Governing in a polarized society means, making bipartisan deals.

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

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

Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, and Clinton passed legislation because they understood and appreciated the difficult political process. They fought for their principles yet recognized the need for compromise to get anything done.

Whenever Congress undertakes large-scale reform, there are times when disaster appears certain - only to be averted at the last minute by the good sense of its sometimes unfairly maligned members.

There are lot of issues we passed out of the House that have gotten not only a lot of Republican support - Tea Party and every group within the Republican conference - but even Democrats.

In fact, when I first came to the Senate, people laughed. I had people telling me, 'There's no way you're going to get a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill done.'

There's a lot of good, bipartisan legislation that passes in committee and then gets bottled up. As a businessman, it surprised me.

Even with the approach that I take in Congress, which is to bring people together to get things done - many people describe that as 'reasonable' - I couldn't vote for John Boehner's re-elect.

When you have... bipartisan support, it shouldn't devolve into a bipartisan fight.

Nothing gets done (in Congress) unless it's bipartisan. And the reason that matters is that it's a function of reality.

The Senate just sits and waits till they find out what the president wants, so they know how to vote against him.

The Democratic line is that the Republican House does nothing but block and oppose. In fact, it has passed hundreds of bills only to have them die upon reaching the desk of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He has rendered the Senate inert by simply ensuring that any bill that might present a politically difficult vote for his Democratic colleagues never even comes to the floor.