Political Quotes

“I praise Senator Grassley for his heroic efforts in trying to bring together a bipartisan group to come up with a package that would help our economy recover. I am disappointed the Senate majority leader has announced his intention to abandon work on the economic recovery package. In light of that reality, however, it is absolutely imperative that the Senate move today to extend to unemployed workers an additional 13 weeks of benefits. This has been needed for a long time, and it is something I have been working on for the past 4 months. In October of last year, I introduced a bipartisan bill for a 13-week extension. I was joined by Senators Landrieu, Gordon Smith, Cleland, and Voinovich. We introduced this bill because we thought it was important to quickly pass a measure of additional security for the 7 million unemployed workers across our Nation. Since that time, unemployment rolls have swelled by 900,000 and over 1.2 million Americans have exhausted their unemployment compensation benefits without being able to find new jobs.”