On the recordMarch 17, 2010
I think a lot of Americans feel that there are things that need to be fixed in health care, and a lot of our colleagues that are Republicans think there are things that need to be fixed in health care, but we don't think you melt the whole system down. One of the things that I was asked in my town hall meeting--and I think maybe there are people that have this question in their minds, so maybe I'll ask myself this question and try to answer it. They said, Okay, you big-mouthed Republican--they didn't quite say that, but they said, You were in the majority for 6 years and you never fixed any of these and now you're bad mouthing them when the Democrats are doing it. Let me tell you about when I was a Republican for the 6 years that I was here when I was in the majority, and that was we passed a whole lot of bills in the House, a number of them, to fix health care that nobody has ever heard of or knows anything about. What happened to those bills? They passed the House. They went to the Senate, and there were Democrats in the Senate that basically filibustered it because we didn't have 60 Republican votes to push it through reconciliation so you could get it out to a vote on the floor.
