Byron Dorgan: “I begin by saying the Senator from Maryland has done this Senate and this country a great service, along with his…”

“I begin by saying the Senator from Maryland has done this Senate and this country a great service, along with his colleagues, including the Presiding Officer, by writing legislation that addresses a critically important topic at a very important time in this country. As much as I appreciate the work done on this bill, I would still like to speak about a few ways in which we can strengthen it. I listened with some attention in the last hour or so as I presided in the Senate to the suggestion that we ought not change it much. I do not disagree with that assessment, but we ought to change it some, in my judgment. There are some areas we can strengthen, and I hope we can strengthen this legislation and send it on to the President and have the expectation the President will sign it. This Chamber has long been the site of debates about excesses and abuses, especially in America's poverty programs. We have heard over a couple of decades, and appropriately so, anecdotal stories about the Cadillac welfare queen who spends food stamp money to buy cigarettes. Congress has clamped down on all of that and said: Shame on you, you cannot do that, that is abusing the public trust. And it is. So we have taken aggressive action as we have seen these abuses. Today this discussion is not about the abuse of the poverty program or the abuse at the bottom, this is about fraud in the boardroom; it is about abuse at the top.”