Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise to offer an amendment to this so-called Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act. It is not a slush fund at all. It is a fund that goes to compensate people who are harmed due to the wrongdoing of mostly large multinational corporations. So this is misnamed. It talks about a slush fund. There is no slush fund involved here. This is an unwise and odious bill. What my amendment would do would be to exempt cases concerning manipulations of emissions standards from the harshness of this bill. In other words, the Federal Government, through the EPA, could institute a lawsuit against a firm or company, large multinational foreign company like Volkswagen, as it did a couple of years ago, and obtain benefits that would accrue to not just the direct recipients of the harm from Volkswagen, but also to society at large that was harmed by Volkswagen's fraudulent activity. What happened was that Volkswagen sold about 590,000 diesel-powered vehicles here in the United States. These vehicles were supposed to conform with U.S. law insofar as emissions standards are concerned. What Volkswagen did was put a mechanism in the cars that would defeat the ability of the regulators who wanted to check to find out whether or not the vehicles complied with emissions standards. So Volkswagen cheated. They sold 590,000--almost 600,000--vehicles on America's roads that were unknowingly polluting the very air that all of us breathe. So we all suffered a harm as a result of Volkswagen's fraud.…”