Political Quotes

“The support for this amendment is broad and deep. The support for this funding level reached 300-some House Members 4 years ago and 70 Senators--including, obviously, a number in each party--4 years ago when we decided to support this number. So this funding level of $575 million is bipartisan. It was established 4 years ago. Some say that $450 million--the amount included in the underlying bill--is enough to operate the program and that we should not bring the funding level back to the $575 million. The fact is that we do not really know. What we do know is that TAA--the trade adjustment assistance, the money we provide to workers to be retrained after they have lost a job because of a decision President Obama and the Congress made to pass a trade agreement, which always produces winners and losers--free trade supporters and free trade opponents all agree and even cheerleaders as passionate as the Wall Street Journal, as strongly supportive as they are of these free-trade agreements, even they acknowledge there are winners and there are losers. The losers are those people who lost their jobs in Indiana, Ohio, Utah, and all over the country because of decisions we made in this body. They are not decisions they made to not show up to work, not decisions they made to not do their work well; they are decisions we made in this Congress and President Obama made at the White House to push these trade agreements, resulting in dislocation, so some workers lose their jobs.…”