Political Quotes

“I understand the point of order. We are going to be facing that with my other six amendments, but I would like to speak to this issue and also to the others at the same time, and I will drop the other amendments. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of driving across San Francisco Bay on the brandnew east San Francisco Bay Bridge, a multibillion-dollar project. The steel of that project in its main section was built in China. It was fabricated in China. The Chinese steel company built a new steel mill, the most advanced in the world. There were 3,000 Chinese jobs and zero American jobs. The way they are able to get around the Buy American provisions is that the State of California segmented the multibillion-dollar project into 20 different pieces, therefore avoiding the Buy America provisions on this crucial center span of that bridge. This amendment would prohibit that from ever happening again. The other amendments speak to the $50 billion that is going to be spent by this bill and would require, in various ways, that that money be spent here in America on American-made goods, American steel, American products, and on American workers. We ought to buy in America. We ought to make this other national policy. We ought never have another Bay Bridge. We ought to do what we did in the American Recovery Act that required that some $800 million for Amtrak locomotives be spent on 100 percent American-made.…”