Political Quotes

“I don't disagree that those negotiations are going on as we speak. I am not a party to them. I don't know if the Senator from Massachusetts is. I suspect the Presiding Officer is. We are not going to decide that. That will come to us for a decision. Look, I worked for a long number of months with my colleagues from the other side of the aisle. I put my name on a bill that doesn't fix it, but it was something to get us moving. It is better than where we are today. I agree with the Senator. But that is not good enough. We are not good enough yet to be where we need to be if we are actually going to solve the problem. Let me finish going through this. We need to end no-bid contracts in this country. To give a specific example, before he left, Senator LeMieux got through on the business bill prescreening of payments on Medicare payments, so we don't just pay them and then go chase the fraud. We got through a bill that required the Centers for Medicaid Services to put in a program to look to see if they ought to pay the bill. What they did is signed a cost-plus contract for $77 million with a firm that has never done that before and didn't take a fixed-price contract from firms that have already done it before. Tell me how we let that happen. Yet it happened. When we had testimony in the committee, they said it was a fixed-price contract, only to write back and say it was not a fixed-price contract. We need some common sense in our government.…”