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Vote Quotes

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Vote Quotes

“What happens is that, you know, on Mondays, at least in the Senate, you know, Monday night wed have what youd call a bed-check vote. Just to get, you know, the machinery of the Senate up and running so they can start the committee process; on Tuesday morning, things go. By Thursday, you know, jet fumes, the smell of jet fumes.”

“That Republicans now control the Senate means, of course, that they control the confirmation process. Their majority enables them to stop an unacceptable nomination at various points: They can deny the nominee a committee hearing; they can vote the person down in committee; they can refuse to schedule a vote on a nomination sent to the floor; and the full Senate can vote to reject the nomination. The Republicans' majority status also strengthens their negotiating position with the White House, making it more likely that a mutually acceptable candidate will be chosen for a given seat.”

“One way we exercise political freedom is to vote for the candidate of our choice. Another way is to use our money to try to persuade other voters to make a similar choice - that is, to contribute to our candidate's campaign. If either of these freedoms is violated, the consequences are very grave not only for the individual voter and contributor, but for the society whose free political processes depend on a wide distribution of political power.”

“The lawyers have escaped most criticism [and undeservedly so]. The tax shelters [were approved by lawyers, who got paid huge commissions to do so] and every miscreant had a high-falutin' lawyer at his side. Why don't more law firms vote with their feet and not take clients who have signs on them that say, "I'm a skunk and will be hard to handle?" I've noticed that firms that avoid trouble over long periods of time have an institutional process that tunes bad clients out. Boy, if I were running a law firm, I'd want a system like that because a lot of firms have a lot of bad clients.”

“We have a duty to our country to participate in the political process. See, if you believe in freedom, you have a duty to exercise your right to vote to begin with. I'm [here] to encourage people to do their duty, to go to the polls. I want all people, no matter what their political party is or whether they even like a political party, to exercise their obligation to vote.”

“The goal of the 'liberals' - as it emerges from the record of the past decades - was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot - by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli.”

“We have reached a stage where governments and political processes have been hijacked by the corporate world. Corporations can within five hours influence the vote in the U.S. Congress. They can influence the entire voting patterns of the Indian Parliament. Ordinary people who put governments in power might want to go in a different direction. I call this the phenomenon of the inverted state, where the state is no longer accountable to the people. The state only serves the interests of corporations.”

“I'm a member of the Recording Academy and I see the way it works and even with the whole voting process it's broken down into specific categories. There are Pop categories and Dance and Rock and Metal and Film and Score and everything else. Basically when you are voting you are urged not to vote in the category that you don't know anything about.”

“You could really belong to a group of people and with other people, you could really make some significant changes - through the electoral process, of course, by registering people to vote, and by supporting good people who were running for office. For me, it was like I had found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

“I'm skeptical about even educating voters as a chance for being successful. You know, when we look at what people retain from high school a year after they've graduated, they've forgotten most everything about history and civics and everything, and I think the main worry here is that because your individual vote counts for so little, you just don't have a strong incentive to invest in the knowledge, to retain the knowledge, to process information in a rational way.”

“There's all kind of evidence that there is enormous corruption in the distribution of that money. For example, they gave about $100 to $150 dollars to each of the teachers. They gave about $500 dollars to those who were getting married. Through this process, they obviously collected a lot of votes, but these monies could not solve the structural problems that these people face. But the only result, the only consequence, was that a big sum from the budget was wasted this way.”

“Hillary Clinton did try to reach out to the Sanders voters with policy concessions, but Sanders voters, especially his most activist core, are process people. They're not policy wonks. They're people who want big money out of politics. They're people who want fairness from the DNC chair. They're people who want every vote to count. They're the people who don't like Wall Street money. Right? They're primarily about the process of politics and whether or not it's fair and whether or not big-money elites are rigging things in your favor.”

“In order to get past disagreements, you just can't have one person with power decide. In other words, so just because I'm a boss, it would be terrible if I then said, "Okay, we're gonna go do this." That's why, after that thoughtful disagreement, there has to be a process of an idea meritocracy. That means okay, now you have to vote, not that the decision resides with power. And then you vote and move beyond it.”

“Take the US. Women were not even able to vote until 90 ago, at about the same time they gained the right in Afghanistan. Rights of former slaves were very limited until the 1960s, and in some ways still are. In these and other domains there has been progress in democracy, though still seriously flawed. In other dimensions - the control of concentrated wealth over the political process, for example, things have gotten much worse in recent years. And there is much more, in both directions.”

“That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted.”