Douglas Alexander: “What was going through my mind was: I don't recall a time when I was Governor of Tennessee that I ever saw the Congress…”

“What was going through my mind was: I don't recall a time when I was Governor of Tennessee that I ever saw the Congress do anything like this. There were unfunded Federal mandates that we didn't like. Back in the early 1970s, before I was Governor, Congress said: We ought to help children with disabilities. We will pay for a certain percentage of it, but they never did. I hear about that all the time from local school boards and local people. But I cannot remember a time when the Congress passed a law saying: We have come up with a great idea here, and we are going to give a State tax break to somebody to pay for it. I think we would have laughed about that. Then we would have gotten really mad about it. It is so farfetched. We are having a very serious debate about this in the Congress. Everybody is going through the motions, making bills doing all these things. But what we are doing is, U.S. Senators are passing State laws. That is what we are doing.”