Political Quotes

“I thank the Chair. Madam President, I tried to be recognized before the majority leader decided to fill the tree, which means taking away the opportunity for amendments to be offered--although there will be an attempt in a moment to offer some. I am disappointed in that, because I think we were very close to reaching an agreement which would have enabled us to move forward with allowing Senators on both sides of the aisle to offer some of their ideas on the unemployment insurance extension. Recall. This is an important debate we are having for the American people. It is about whether we go beyond the roughly 26 weeks in unemployment insurance to having an emergency extension again. On this side of the aisle, there were a few of us who, in fact, crossed over to vote with the entire Democratic majority to say let's have that debate. We thought we were doing so in good faith in that there would actually be a debate on two issues. One is whether it should be paid for and how it should be paid for, which I will address in a second, but second is how we should reform the unemployment insurance program and do other appropriate policies to get at the underlying problem, which is a record level, a record number of Americans who are long-term unemployed. Clearly what we are doing isn't working, and we believe this is an opportunity for us to help improve the program to actually address the real problem. The President of the United States wants us to do that.…”