Political Quotes

“Reclaiming my time, I would take a stab at that and submit off of Mr. McHenry's remarks as well that when you have a closed process and in fact it is not necessarily a closed process; it is a no process, no process for hearings, no process for subcommittee, no process for full committee, no process for Rules Committee and no process on the floor that allows for any amendments, then there is no way to go back and really identify who is going to get the credit for this brilliant exemption that has been drafted into the minimum wage bill. So we can only then rely on the open press, the press accounts, and I am grateful that we do have a first amendment because they have gone back and reported and have publicly not been refuted remarks made by the chairman of the committee, who has gone to the Pacific and examined the labor circumstances there and found that the labor circumstances in American Samoa justify exemptions, but those in the Marianas do not justify exemptions, just to draw a real close comparison there, even though the worst example of a sweat shop that prosecutors had ever seen was the perpetrator that was sentenced to 40 years for abusing 300 employees in American Samoa. And so the exemption, then, is admitted publicly by the chairman of the committee as being drafted into the bill under his advice and his request, and that is the closest thing we have, but there is no opportunity to amend it in or out or to add to or detract from.”