Political Quotes

“I want to thank the ranking member for his service and the chairman for his service. I also want to thank the staff. It has been an extraordinarily arduous, sleep-depriving and angst-creating process, I know, to get this bill from this floor over to the Senate floor and through conference, so I congratulate the staff. We are blessed as a country and as a Congress to have extraordinarily qualified people who could, frankly, make very significantly more in the private sector stick with us and with our country. Their patriotism and their talent is an extraordinary benefit to us all. Madam Speaker, I want to thank Chairman Smith and the Democratic members and the majority staff of the Armed Services Committee, as well as the ranking member and the minority staff. They have been working very hard on this legislation. The conference report before us represents a compromise. No one ought to think that is a pejorative. It is what we do. And it means, in compromising, you do not get everything you want. Obviously, many of the things that we passed on the floor of this House that we believed were very, very important items are not in this conference report. It could lead some to say, well, then we won't vote for it. That would be a mistake on either side of the aisle. I am particularly pleased, however, that this report, this bill does include, for the first time, 12 weeks of paid parental leave for the birth or adoption of a child for all Federal civilian employees.…”