In persuasion there is no clock; there is an acquired sense of when there is an opening and an even more acquired sense of when to step into that opening.
It always matters whether or not you can trust your government.
I don’t like bonuses for public services employees who do great jobs, like prosecutors or judges.
I taught the Constitution for ten years, I believe in the Constitution.
She was fabulously wrong when she said it the first time, and stunningly arrogant in her refusal to express any regret for lying to our fellow citizens.
I would love the chance to ask follow-up questions of Susan Rice because David Gregory apparently did not avail himself of that opportunity. Greta, I just listened to the clip – I get tougher questions in the Bojangles drive-through than he asked her.
The same Constitution that allows her the right, if she wants to, to sit there and say nothing, allows these groups the right to petition their government for redress.
You know, in the oath that brand-new citizens take, it contains six different references to ‘the law.’ If it’s good enough for us to ask brand-new citizens to affirm their devotion to the law, is it too much to ask that the president do the same?
Facts are neither Republican nor Democrat.
I’m unelectable in the District of Columbia.
When you go into public service, you understand you’re trading something. You want to feel good about what you do, but you’re not going to make what people in private sector make.
There’s a reason that students don’t grade their own papers. There’s a reason defendants don’t sentence themselves. And there’s the reason the State Department doesn’t get to investigate itself, determine whether or not it made errors in Benghazi. That is Congress’s job.
I don’t have an issue with whether – from a legal standpoint, with whether or not government can impose the ultimate punishment on people. We do it in capital cases. Police officers shoot fleeing felons.
Your memo is trumping a Congressional statute. You don’t have the discretion on whether to follow the law or not.
What do we do with a president who can basically change what Congress passed by attaching a letter saying I don’t agree with this part or that part?
What is our recourse, Mr. Speaker? What is our remedy?
I can tell you this. It is not going to be evenly constituted and when she was Speaker Pelosi, she certainly showed no interests in having an equal number of Republicans and Democrats.
There is more civility in a death penalty trial than there is in politics.
Getting someone to do something they were not planning on doing. Convincing someone to buy into something they never knew they were looking for. That is persuasion.
You own every declarative comment that comes out of your mouth, but with questions you have an out. Because of that, questions are perhaps first and foremost the safest route in the art of persuasion.