Political Quotes

“I won't speak for 5 minutes. I've been sitting here waiting for my amendment to come up, which it will in a couple of hours probably. But I have to make one comment on everything I'm hearing on the floor. We hear amendment after amendment to extend unemployment benefits to the unemployed in a time when we have 9 percent unemployment, and they're struck down because there's no pay-for. The amendment provides no other means of paying for the unemployment insurance. For the last 50 or 60 years it was never considered necessary, in a time of recession and high unemployment, that in order to extend unemployment benefits you had to find someplace else to pay for it. It was automatic emergency spending until this Republican Congress. I hear amendment after amendment that's denied. We can't even formulate certain amendments because we can only increase, not even increase spending, we can only restore draconian spending cuts on human services that are necessary for our people if we reduce other human services. But the tax cuts that we've seen, the huge tax cuts of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars for our wealthiest citizens at a time when the top 1 percent of our people, the richest 1 percent of our people have 24 percent of the income and almost half of the wealth in the country, we can't talk about increasing or restoring those tax cuts. Those tax cuts are a given.…”