Christopher Shays: “I'd like to speak on this amendment. I couldn't get to the floor fast enough. I have immense respect for my colleague…”

“I'd like to speak on this amendment. I couldn't get to the floor fast enough. I have immense respect for my colleague from Arizona, but I think that he has confused the issues in a way that's very powerful until you look at it. This is a service program, and we're asking young people to serve their country. They're given a minimum wage. The last I knew people need food and money in order to stay somewhere. To ask an 18- or 19- year-old young person to serve without having the ability to buy food and to live somewhere strikes me as pretty remarkable. I view this as service just as I view serving in the military as service. This is something they do because they want to be part of a higher cause and we designed this program so it wasn't a one-size-fits-all. It's not this big government program. What we designed this program to do is to allow each of the States to create programs through nonprofit organizations and others, and we allow the States to choose which programs they want to fund. And that means you're going to have a lot of good programs and you are going to have some bad programs. You're going to have programs that really do a terrific job and some programs that don't do a good job. I congratulate the former administration for its willingness to design a Republican kind of program, a program that has a competitive model.”