Dale Bumpers Quotes

Huntington and his associates were used to bribing Congressmen to vote for favorable railroad legislation.

Hollings who was one of the senior experienced senators was offended by the degree to which the George W. Bush Administration and the Republican leadership had turned to lobbyists to draft legislation and amendments to pending legislation. Lobbyists often have specialized information that members of Congress do not have, so there has been in modern times communications between lobbyists and members of Congress and their staffs. However, during the Bush Presidency the practice reached an extreme where lobbyists would even write the legislative language and give it to the members in whom they had invested by giving them large campaign contributions and many perks. K Street is the fanciest street in Washington DC with some of the most expensive office space. A substantial proportion of the lobbyists have K Street offices, hence the metaphor.

This was one of the most remarkable statements made by a Congressional leader. At the time, the Congress was in the midst of one of the worst stalemates in American Political History. The national debt limit had to be raised in order to legally pay for the expenses that the Congress had voted for and the President had approved. A minority of the House—the Tea Party--tried to use the necessary legislation to get a program of theirs legislated when they did not have the votes to pass it in both houses of Congress. The House would not approve any solution that the Senate would pass, and the Senate would not pass any of the House proposals. The Boenner and the President had reached a compromise but the minority of his own party refused to go along and threatened to oust the Speaker and not vote for the Compromise. To them, compromise was surrender and doing business as usual. At the same time, the left wing of the President’s party did not want to vote for the Compromise plan that the President and the Speaker had worked out. Then the Minority Leader of the Senate, create a new plan that would transcend solve the immediate problem and defer the larger issues which would continue to be debated. The Senate Majority Leader agreed to go along with it and so did the President, but the Minority Leader’s fellow Republicans in the House refused to vote for that compromise. The President and then Boenner went on national television sequentially to explain the situation and the Speaker made this famous quotation, Boenner, we caught in an impossible situation. His Tea Party faction insisted that there need not be a stalemate. The President and the Senate needed the debt limit raised and they would have to give in and vote for the Tea Party plan. Almost all of the Tea Party members were new to Congress and Bonner realized that an entire party who controlled the Senate would never be blackmailed that way, and even if they did, the President would Veto. Yet his own deputy was preferred by the Tea Party and some others, so if Boenner tried to act statesman like, he was risking his speakership. So he became the spokesperson of the Tea Party wing and denied what 90 percent of all Americans knew to be true. Usually absurd statements clearly contrary to the facts at the time are the results of mistakes or gaffs. Occasionally, a more complex situation explains it.

His admonition did little good. That Congress passed fewer bills than any other in history.

That Congress was the worst in U. S. History. They passed fewer laws than any other and spent most of their time raising money and slandering the other party on the media.

3rd Earl Russell of Kingston. We was half a century ahead of Ronald Reagan and the conservatives on this one.