Don Nickles: “I heard the comments of my colleague from Alaska, but basically what he is saying is we should not tell the Department…”

“I heard the comments of my colleague from Alaska, but basically what he is saying is we should not tell the Department of Labor how to spend money. In this appropriations bill we appropriate money for the Department of Labor. In this case they appropriated about $22 million--admittedly it came from the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice--to conduct this last election. And they did a pretty crummy job. We paid millions of dollars and we ended up with a corrupt election. I do not want that to happen again. We talk about adherence to the consent decree that was agreed to in 1989. I think my original amendment is in adherence to the 1989 consent decree, because it said that the Teamsters will pay for the 1991 election. They paid for it. And guess what. There was no complaint that it was a corrupt election. They paid for it themselves. You know what. People are a lot more frugal with their own money. They are less likely to steal from their own members. They are less likely to be corrupt maybe with their own members' money than they would be with taxpayer money. So we had a 1991 election. Mr. Carey won. Fine. And I don't know that anybody--there was an overseer in the 1991 election. They did not allege fraud in that. So the 1991 election was done by the Teamsters. They paid for it. They should have paid for it. They had a good election. No one said a thing. The 1996 election the taxpayers paid for.”