Political Quotes

“Does that make this pilot program that we are talking about, this identification verification program, the linchpin in this legislation? Is the absence of that going to make this toothless, Mr. President? I do not think so. Quite the contrary. I think, if anything, it will burden the bill and burden American citizens--taxpayers, employers, and employees--with an excessive amount of redtape, bureaucracy, and big Government intrusion that is not going to handsomely pay off in terms of the benefits it produces. Let me just talk about some of those costs once again. First of all, this approach is the kind of big Government bureaucracy approach that I think most of us in this Congress have been arguing we find too dominant already in the American economy. Do we really want to have another bureaucracy, another effort here to try to create hoops for businesses to jump through as they make employment decisions, or for U.S. citizens, who are entitled to be employed, to jump through in order to secure employment? Clearly, it is going to be a costly venture and a costly one both in terms of bureaucratic redtape as well as in taxpayer dollars. I was glad to hear the term ``$10 billion'' used as a possibility of the cost involved here. I do not know what the total costs are going to be. No one, in fact, on the floor knows that. But it is certainly conceivable that it will be great.…”