Political Quotes

“Then we hear something about gridlock. If the Senator had been here 2 years ago, you would have been part of gridlock--and I say ``the Senator'' rather than ``you''; I want to be careful of my language for the Record--because the Republican side would not let us go with pieces of legislation we thought were important. Now they have become part of the Contract With America. The same pieces of legislation, basically, that were filibustered in the last session of Congress are now in the Contract With America. Surprising, is it not? Surprising. We stand here in the last few days, last couple of weeks, and act like the world has stopped. We forgot aging in the bill that came out of committee. It would have gone on and we would have excluded aging in the amendment. And the manager of the bill from the Republican side, the majority side, was a cosponsor of that amendment when he found out about it. So we have made some contribution. We had an amendment last night that was defeated, but utilities--and your State ought to be very interested in utilities--wanted that very badly, because the mandates to private enterprise stick and they do not stick on public entities under this legislation. So it is the business-oriented group here, I guess you would say, who have said to business: We are going to stick it to you. Because the mayors and commissioners out there are raising Cain, we are going to let them off the hook. So we have incinerators: Private and public.”