Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator very much. I will go back and will reengage with our secretary and make sure we have the math right. The other point that he made--I asked him: How hard would it be to administer? Is it something we could stand up in a couple of weeks or are we talking about months or what? He said this would not be an easy thing, administratively, to do. And at a time where we are anxious to get the benefit out the door in a hurry, this would not be easy. I would just ask us to keep that in mind. One of the people I talked to last week when I was trying to figure out, really, what kind of big package legislative package No. 3 should be--Leon Panetta is one of the people I talked to. He told me about the three t's: timely, targeted, and temporary. Those are the three that he talked about. Timely means making sure we figure or calculate the right benefit but that we are able to turn around and pay it in a timely way. What I gathered from my secretary of labor is we are not going to be able to incorporate what they are doing at the State level, feed into that the State and the Federal benefit, and do it in a timely way. I think, if we could do that, you would have, probably, a fair amount of bipartisan support. But it is that delay, and we just don't know how long that delay would be Ted Kennedy used to sit behind me when I first came to the Senate. And I noticed that I knew some Senators.…”