Political Quotes

“The reason why this amendment should not be considered, why the tobacco companies will jump for joy if it is adopted, is that it will discourage any State from bringing its lawsuit against the tobacco companies. The Senator from Alabama, for reasons I do not understand, has decided that no State of the 40 that filed suits, no matter how deeply they are involved in this litigation, can pay outside attorney's fees beyond $5 million, which sounds like a huge sum of money until you consider States like Minnesota. Minnesota has been preparing for trial on January 19, has now collected millions of documents from these tobacco companies, has warehouses in London and in Minneapolis. They have attorneys scouring through the documents and processing them. They are preparing to go to trial. In my home State of Illinois, I do not think we have made nearly that progress in moving toward litigation. But the Senator from Alabama does not care that the attorneys in Minnesota have been working overtime for months and the attorneys in Illinois may not have been. He says, we are going to pick an arbitrary figure--no State can pay their attorneys no matter how much work they have put into this, any more than $5 million, period. Now, that is fundamentally unfair.”