Political Quotes

“I am going to offer this amendment despite the fact that the Shays amendment did pass because I believe the integrity of the Committee on Government Reform is important enough so that what they voted on in the full committee should be what is sent over to the conferees and what ultimately will become law. The amendment that I am offering today is with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis), who is the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Civil Service, Census and Agency Organization, and very much a supporter of Federal employees. What the amendment does is it simply aims to protect the union rights of existing employees transferred to the new Department of Homeland Security who have the same duties. I want to point out at the onset that the language of my amendment is similar to language that was included in the gentleman from Texas's (Mr. Thornberry) original Homeland Security bill and the language that was agreed to on a bipartisan basis by the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. Let me just say one big agency, 22 other agencies become part of Homeland Security; therefore, everything under it is called security. Therefore, it offers an opportunity for arbitrarily saying that some union rights will be taken away from some people. One hundred seventy thousand employees would be part of it.”