Political Quotes

“What we have seen take place here in the last hour or 45 minutes is what has been going on in the Senate for the last 8 or 10 months. We cannot do things quite perfect enough. There is always some kind of a problem. With the balanced budget, we agreed to a balanced budget but there was always a poison pill that was involved. The poison pill with the balanced budget was Medicaid, Medicare, whacking the environment. It was not good enough that the President and Democrats agreed there would be a balanced budget in 7 years using the figures from the CBO. That was not good enough. What they had to do was the majority had to ruin it. They ruined it with their poison pills, with excessive cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. Welfare reform--remember, we had a welfare reform bill. It passed here in a bipartisan basis. But the majority in the House and Senate decided they wanted to block grant Medicaid. They wanted to cut off a million disabled children from welfare. That made it so we could not pass welfare reform. Minimum wage, something that is long overdue, about 90 percent of the American public think it is the fair thing to do, to increase the minimum wage, but, no, they have to tie on to that something called the TEAM Act, some kind of small business exemption which is a disguise, that is all it is, to, in effect, gut the minimum wage. Everyone knows the jobs in America are not created by General Motors, Lockheed and the big corporations, but by small businesses.”