Political Quotes

“right before we had our break we were asked, Senator Daschle and I, to see what we could do to move the FSC bill along. The majority has affixed the name the jobs and opportunity bill, or something like that. We have always known the importance of this legislation, and we did our very best to move this along. It was held up initially because we wanted a vote on overtime. The majority, for reasons I fully don't understand, refused to allow us to have a vote on this. As the Chair will recall, this amendment passed previously. What our amendment would do is say the President does not have the right to take away the ability of American nurses, firemen, police, and a total of 8 million people, from getting overtime. In effect, what we have been told by the administration is they were going to promulgate a rule that would take away overtime pay for people who make more than $22,000 a year. We wanted a vote on this. You can't do that. It passed once; it was stricken in a Republican-only conference. The House passed a resolution saying they wanted their conferees to do the same thing the Senate did and stop the President from doing this. We have been told by the majority--the distinguished majority leader has come out here on a number of occasions and said this is a must-pass bill. American businesses are getting hurt. So Senator Daschle and I worked for the better part of a day calling individual Members. We had 75 amendments. We worked to get them cut down.…”