Legislative Outcomes Quotes

Jon Kyl did a really good job of presenting a case and moving issues. John McCain probably is one of the more effective legislators, getting things on through the process. I always thought, too - and this may seem kind of odd - Richard Shelby was just an effective guy a lot of times at stopping things.

The Senate, as opposed to the House, has been less successful in advancing some of the legislation that I think are important to Hoosiers.

As a rule of thumb. Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.

My goal is to get leadership to bring more conservative policies to the floor; it's not the other way around to get conservatives to vote for something they don't like. It's to get a more conservative product, and we've actually delivered on a number of occasions there.

No legislator ever got in trouble for voting against a bill that passed or for a bill that didn’t pass.

The increasing supply of lobbyists should have driven the price of lobbying down, not up. … The most credible explanation … is that clients grew more and more confident that their lobbyists could deliver something of value in exchange for their fees. … The reason companies started buying, in other words, was that Congress began selling.

Wall-to-wall coverage of the political intrigue in Washington focuses on which Capitol Hill players won the daily news cycle, with barely any reference to the communities and lives where politicians' decisions actually hit home.

When we visited with legislative counsel, they told us that the only way to effectively accomplish what we were trying to do was to put the words in the legislation.

I learned that Congress is a place with more heart than courage; there are more good souls in Washington than brave ones. I learned that the whole is not always the sum of its parts: that what you put in doesn't always match what you get out.