Judd Gregg: “I always enjoy the eloquence of the Senator from Connecticut. I am a great admirer of him as a legislator and as a…”

“I always enjoy the eloquence of the Senator from Connecticut. I am a great admirer of him as a legislator and as a colleague in this body, but I must disagree with his analysis of what this proposed regulation does. Let's begin with the fact that this is a proposed regulation. That means it is not final. It means the Department is still in the process of adjusting it, of building it, of designing it. They have received 80,000 comments. The approach of the other side of the aisle is to say we do not care what the 80,000 comments were; we do not care what the process is for regulatory review. We are going to step in, and we are going to unilaterally decide that a law that has not been adjusted in over 30 years is a good law, shall be law, and shall never be changed. It makes very little sense. When this regulation was initiated, America was an entirely different country. It had a different employment structure, different individual types of responsibilities within the employment structure. We had jobbers. We had people who were working on the line as the primary responsibility of our manufacturing structure. Today we are a much more mobile society. We are a much more dynamic and flexible workplace. We are a workplace which reflects massive change in the way we compete and are successful as an economy. Yet a law passed 30 years ago does not keep up with those changes.”