Chuck Grassley: “I gave some opening remarks a little earlier on this legislation, but I will reiterate a few points I made from that…”

“I gave some opening remarks a little earlier on this legislation, but I will reiterate a few points I made from that first statement. The most important thing to remember, as we are trying to reach an agreement on a stimulus package, is there has been a lot of work put into this over the last several weeks--not since the holidays but before the holidays--and we have had partisan approaches by both Republicans and Democrats. We have had bipartisan approaches. We have had cooperation between some Members of Congress and the White House, and we have a bipartisan White House-centrist package that has passed the House that the President said he would sign, and one that had a majority vote, if we had taken a vote in the Senate before the holidays, that could have been to the President by now. It would have been to the President, signed into law, and helping 800,000 people unemployed since the September 11 terrorist attacks on America. This White House-centrist bipartisan package is a solid economic stimulus plan. Most important, it has a compassionate approach to put displaced workers first, and even more so than the amendment offered by Senator Daschle because he does--as I would agree to do--put in 13 weeks of additional unemployment compensation. However, his consensus package does nothing for those unemployed workers now who had health insurance previously. They have to pay the health insurance called COBRA out of their own pocket.”