A Quote by Peter Welch
Historically, the minority party in Congress votes against raising the debt limit, forcing the majority party to whip its members into casting politically painful votes in favor.
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Historically, the responsibility for voting on the debt limit has gone to the party in the majority.
I guess 35 years ago, I thought we had more of a democracy than we actually do. Majority support doesn't help unless the majority is active and votes - but the opposition minority votes a much greater proportion, so we often lose by a narrow margin.
[The Republican Party] for example, they do run the House of Representatives, they're a majority there, and it's the House that is essentially sending the government into shutdown and maybe default. But they won the majority of seats there because of various kinds of chicanery. They got a minority of the votes, but a majority of the seats, and they're using them to press forward an agenda which is extremely harmful to the public.
It does look like it's almost like South Africa to this extent: You have a white - what's the word - feeble minority. It's losing its majority status. And it says, the Republican Party, 'We can only get so many white votes. So, we got to reduce the votes of others.' It does look that way. Only the - maybe you're non-partisan, but only Republicans have pushed this in these 31 states. No Democratic legislature. You gotta look at the pattern here. You talk about profiling. I'm sorry, Republicans do this stuff.
They all want to be me. They do! What everybody else says they will do, I've already been doing. They all want to be me. It's become a joke in Congress how Dr. Gingrey and Mr. Kingston have been following my votes. They've even changed votes to what I voted, multiple times. Members of Congress are laughing about it.
It's counterintuitive, but the most divisive arrangement is when the same party controls both Congress and the presidency, a situation encountered in eight of the past 10 years. With government unified under a single party, the minority has the least possible incentive to cooperate with the majority.
Incumbents are safe, but party majorities are not. This fosters symbolic votes, message politics and little serious legislating in Congress.
When you have the most votes of anybody that tells you where the party is. I think the party got lost to a certain extent.
Over the years, increasing partisanship has led many members of Congress reflexively to speak in favor of any military action launched by presidents of their own party while withholding support to presidents of the opposing party.
The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.
The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a traditional political party. It's in lockstep obedience to the very rich, the super rich and the corporate sector. They can't get votes that way so they have to mobilize a different constituency. It's always been there, but it's rarely been mobilized politically. They call it the religious right, but basically it's the extreme religious population.
The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.
They believe the less votes the better. Republicans like to suppress votes because they believe they do better in small turnouts. Characteristically, Democrats would rather lose an election with a huge turnout than win one with a small turnout because we think that the values of democracy have to be placed above the interests of the party. The reason that Republicans are such failures at governing is because they place the interests of their party ahead of the interests of the country.
We have got to go and compete for the minds and the hearts and the votes of everybody in this country, no matter who they are. And what I think we've had is one party takes a group of people for granted and another party has not paid attention to them.
I think a fair amount of my votes were 'not-for-Ortiz,' votes and I'm going to have to work hard to earn the 'for Blake' votes.
I found, in the Senate, you can have significant impact whether you're in the minority party or the majority party, and a lot of it goes back to... that you really have to be able to count to 60.
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