Political Quotes

“I wish to speak for 2 minutes to close this out. I thank the Senator from Alaska who has been very forceful in his advocacy for this bill and for lending the experience he has had, before he was a Senator, as a small business owner to help strengthen this bill. I want to be very clear. As this bill stands right now, this was a bipartisan bill when it came out of the Small Business Committee and the Finance Committee and it still is a bipartisan bill. The only two changes that have been made to this bill we are going to vote on tomorrow--the only two that were made to this bill--No. 1 was a LeMieux-Landrieu amendment that added a $30 billion small business lending fund that was voted on on the floor of this Senate by 60 Senators, a voluntary small business lending fund that goes only to small community banks so they can turn around and lend money to Main Street. That is it. In addition, the Senator was smart enough to also ask for, and it was in that amendment, an antifraud provision to save the taxpayers money from people trying to defraud the Federal Government by not using their credit cards in the right way when they pay for Medicaid and Medicare services. That is an added benefit to the taxpayer. The third piece of this amendment, to be very clear, was an expansion of an export provision that Senator Snowe and I jointly put on the bill that the Senator did with Senator Klobuchar.…”