partisan dynamics Quotes

Holding Congressional hearings is the purview of the majority, and during the first years of the Obama administration, Democrats could not be bothered.

I have learned when two Republicans are talking about legalizing drugs to shut up.

I am so out of sympathy with what seems to be the prevailing currents of American opinion that I keep my judgment suspended as regards the political wisdom of certain [Republican] party moves

Now the Democrats control the Senate. But the good news is that now the Republicans can admit that Strom Thurmond has been dead since 1988.

Conservatives are always looking for converts, whereas liberals are always looking for heretics.

We had a great lunch. Senator Capper paid for it. The Republican pays, as usual. And everything that the Democrats are doin' now, the Republicans pay for it. Everybody asks me, "Will, how long is this going to go on, spending all this money and everything going like this?" I says, "Well, it will go on just as long as the Republicans has got any money. That's all I know about it."

The judiciary is not supposed to be the dominant branch of the federal government. It is supposed to be one of three equal branches. For now, Republicans have the upper hand because Democrats don’t have the votes in Congress to change the law. But the harsh recent [Democrat] criticism is intended to be an early step in a long campaign to constrain the court.

It's interesting that at a time when she could have differentiated herself from the ranks of [Democratic National Committee Chairman] Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and the far left ranks of the Democratic Party, she chose to join those on the front ranks of the blame game, It would have been interesting if she had shown some level of restraint.

The Democrats are incapable of even being accused of violating political correctness, so they don't even worry about it. The Democrats have really grown accustomed, however, to Republicans not attacking, not criticizing them.

It'll be good - knowing that you have Republicans, Democrats. But even with the Republicans, you have conservatives, you have moderates. You have many different factions. And all good people, and they all want something different. You know, it's - it's something that's very interesting.

How is it that I became a conservative from being a liberal? It's because I witnessed how liberals behaved to a conservative. They treated him poorly. Had I not seen that, I wouldn't have opened my eyes.

The Democrats, because they are the media, still establish the narrative for Washington every day. And whatever that narrative is, the Republicans - for some reason (I think it's force of habit and years and years of conditioning) - still become subservient to whatever that narrative is.

[Bill] Clinton was able to defeat conservatives, Republicans, at every turn. And so he was given wide latitude, leeway. He could do whatever he wanted and not be condemned for it. But young people today are not prone to rewarding that kind of behavior.

That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.

We fall for... the theories of betrayal very easily, and one of the things that's always depressed me about the left, ever since I started in politics, is their ability to imbibe the propaganda of the right and regurgitate it to the left.

Ever since Richard Nixon walloped George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972, political pundits have treated as a truism the proposition that liberals are out of step with the rest of the nation, and therefore all but unelectable outside the precincts of the Northeast -- give or take a college town here or a ski resort there. During the course of every presidential election for the past forty years now, Republicans have sought to wield the word liberal as if it were a six-gauge shotgun.

Politics really is a team sport. You really have to work the whole system to get somewhere down the road.

In the campaign back in 2007, 2008, people would say, "Oh, he's being naïve. He thinks that there's no red states and blue states. And wait 'til he gets here." And I will confess that, I didn't fully appreciate the ways in which individual senators or members of Congress now are pushed to the extremes by their voter bases. I did not expect, particularly in the midst of crisis, just how severe that partisanship would be.

We can't ... take that piece of reality in this business and set that aside and say, well, that doesn't count. And the Republicans on my side understand that the majority is in fact up for grabs next year. So there's not a decision made up here that doesn't have that factor coursing through that current.

I would be very, very strong on the debt limit. And I would be asking for a very big pound of flesh if I were the Republicans. And the problem with the Republicans, they have two sides. The smaller side is very strong and the other side is always agreeing and, you know, you can't do that.