Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I want to thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to be able to come to this floor and join in agreement with the gentleman from Pennsylvania. It does not happen very often, but I am glad we can be here. This is about the working class. I represent a district in northeast Ohio that has high union membership. As the gentleman from Pennsylvania stated a few minutes ago, there are a lot of contract negotiations. They are always happening. And more often than not, over the last 20 or 30 years, the men and women of labor have been forced to negotiate contracts where they didn't get an increase, maybe a 1 percent, 1\1/2\ percent increase, but they were always able to sustain their healthcare. So this is a very important piece of legislation, one I know we have been working on. I want to thank the gentlewoman from Washington State. I want to thank Chairman Neal from the Ways and Means Committee. This has been a long time coming. I hope we can fix this, and I hope it is the first step to us building out a better healthcare system that is more affordable, more accessible, more innovative, and more focused on prevention as we move down road in the next several months.”