Political Quotes

“I rise today to urge the Democratic leadership here in the House to abandon the health care process that I believe has started this morning in the subcommittee of the gentleman from California. Let me report to my colleagues that my understanding is that with the public Clinton plan now dead, because the public has rejected it so decisively, there is now a secret Clinton plan. Nobody knows what it is, including, I think, the Democratic leadership, but they have decided that they cannot pass anything out of the subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, so they are going to try to go to the full Committee on Energy and Commerce. They have decided that the bill they are going to mark up today in the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Ways and Means probably will not be the bill that they will mark up in the full Committee on Ways and Means. They have decided, according to some newspapers this weekend, that if they cannot get anything out of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, they will simply take the Committee on Ways and Means bill to the Committee on Rules, and sometime around May or June write another bill in the Committee on Rules, bring that to the floor, then they will try to get that bill to go to conference. Then, with almost no time left at the end of the session in September or October, they will rush a thousand-page bill to the floor.”