Political Quotes

“I appreciate the gentleman's work in putting the statement together, but as someone who has lived this 30 years, I don't accept this statement on its face, and I can tell you that my hands-on experience tells me something entirely different. The statement that was made that says that three-quarters of these decisions are not based solely on union scale. It might be based on union scale in a union contract or sitting down in a room to make an agreement with the Department of Labor. I don't know how these deals are made. It is union scale, and they sit there and decide we can drive up the costs of these public projects, and we can make sure that we can pay more in wages and benefits to anybody else and cut out the competition so that the entrepreneurs, the people that are founding businesses that are trying to get into this market, are locked out of the market. Davis-Bacon locks people out of the market. It locks minorities out of the market. If you look around and you hear that expression, ``people doing work that Americans won't do''--well, if you look around, the unions have been locking minorities out ever since 1932. That was the purpose of this bill. By the way it was a couple of misguided Republicans that passed the Davis-Bacon Act and got that started. I'm embarrassed about that. One day we will have to fix this because Davis-Bacon is the last vestige of the Jim Crow laws in the United States of America.…”