Policy Negotiation Quotes

Obamacare is the wildly complex Rube Goldberg contraption it is because getting the legislation through Congress required so many political tradeoffs and so many unavoidable deals with so many vested interests. But that's no excuse.

I had to leave the Foreign Service to do the two things I joined it to do—negotiate, and make policy.

…the War Department was…something that stood between the Army and Congress; that way to get legislation for the Army was no to try to educate Congress and the people to Army methods, but to educate the War Department to congressional methods.

You start as far to the right as you can get, and go to the Conference Committee with the Senate, and hopefully end up with something you can live with.

President Obama was never going repeal Obamacare - he was not going to be brought to his knees with the threat of a government shutdown.

I do want to see an immigration compromise. And you can't have an immigration compromise if everybody's out there calling the president a racist.

Donald Trump said - as a show of good faith - he was gonna work with people to try to replace Obamacare, to repeal and replace it rather than just to let it implode, let it fail.

Some presidents, such as Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, are political sailors - they tack with the wind, reaching difficult policy objectives through bipartisan maneuvering and pulse-taking.

The First Step Act, the WEEE Act, and President Trump's infrastructure and immigration compromise plans all serve as examples of Trump administration outreach to the Democrats.

Normally, I would seek to compromise, but not on immigration policy.

One of the really positive things about minority government is that there is the necessity to broker policy positions. What happens is you get a hybrid of what a single party might do. And I don't think that is a bad thing.

Donald Trump so far is sending a signal that he's going to run the government like his business and maybe that's going to work. It's a new approach but there's no doubt that he wants to run this as one continuing negotiation. It's just that who he's negotiating with that changes and he believes that he can impose better deals and the United States with benefit from them.

It's my preferred working style to have bipartisan legislation. I think what the Democrats have made clear is that they don't want to deal with anything that repeals and replaces Obamacare. I think they wouldn't want to do anything that gets rid of the mandates, which is a big part of our proposal, getting rid of the individual employer mandates.