Rand Paul: “when Hurricane Sandy struck the Northeast, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people were without power. We all…”

“when Hurricane Sandy struck the Northeast, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people were without power. We all saw the video footage. We saw the terrible trauma, and people are still trying to dig out from underneath the debris of Hurricane Sandy. During that period of time, hundreds of workers drove up from the South wanting to help. These workers were nonunionized, and they were turned away. This was a sad day for our country that nonunion workers were not allowed to participate in the cleanup and were asked to join a union before they would be accepted as workers. I think it is a mistake to politicize things such as this, particularly in a time of an emergency. So what I have asked for and what my amendment would do is allow an exemption to Davis-Bacon. Davis-Bacon is a Federal law that requires that we not have competitive bidding on Federal projects. What happens is on Federal projects the wages are fixed at a union scale wage and there is not a competitive bidding for wages. So what I have asked is that we suspend that and say, in order to get better use of the money, in order to advance the money by billions of dollars and do more with the money--and this is an enormous amount of money, running into the billions of dollars--in order to get better use of our money, to suspend Davis-Bacon, and we would basically be allowing competitive bidding on wages. This has been done before. President Nixon and both President Bushes did this.…”