Congressional Dysfunction Quotes

Congress is almost totally dysfunctional right now. All we've done this year and my first year in the Senate ... is barely keep the doors open.

Congress has been reformed so much that it can't get anything done.

We saw what happened in Jimmy Carter's administration. President Carter was a good man with the best of intentions. But he came to Washington without a good working relationship with Democratic members of Congress, which played a big part in his administration's problems.

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.

You can see how dysfunctional this Congress is.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

It seems as though there are Members in this body who want to filibuster just about everything we try to do, whether it is stopping judicial nominations, the Energy bill, or this Medicare bill.

The House Republican leadership has simply run out of ideas.

Congress doesn’t quite speak clearly much of the time.

Overall, Congress is dysfunctional, partisan, and polarized, and it isn’t getting anything done. We need commissions to break out of divisive partisanship.

Talking heads will chatter, argue, and rant on TV and in the houses of Congress but that's all they will do. Weeks and months will go by in which the crowning achievement of Congress may be little more than perhaps passing a bill to declare National Eat Your Spinach Week (sponsored, of course, by the Spinach Growers of America).

The Democrats in particular are do-nothing guys.

It's no great secret, number one, in my view, and I think the view of most Americans, that Congress itself is pretty dysfunctional. We are not addressing the real needs of the American people. And second of all, philosophically, there is a huge division between the House and the Senate.

Why is it so hard for the Congress to do something for the public?

Obama rammed through Obamacare legislation without a single Republican vote.

Congress is more broken than ever. Congressman Will Hurd has quickly become part of the problem.

Congress doesn’t do comprehensive well.

When you see John Boehner crying, believe you me, it's because he cannot control, uh, that wild contingency called the Tea Party.

As every newspaper reader, liberal activist, or parliamentary junkie knows, the overarching barrier to most of Obama's agenda is the abuse of the filibuster in the Senate. In fact, several of Obama's second term priorities are not ideas in search of a majority - they are majorities in search of an up-or-down vote.

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.

Congress has lost its capacity to manage itself.

The shutdown may have temporarily sidetracked the Republicans, yet Obamacare threatens much worse for the Democrats. By 2014 the former will be ancient history, while the latter will be an ongoing mess.

The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.

Paul Ryan needs to step down as Speaker of the House.

Most of us complain about Congress. We say it's a place that doesn't reflect us; they don't listen to us. Actually, Congress well reflects the American people. It gives us exactly what we ask for.