Political Quotes

“and colleagues, later this morning, the Senate will be voting on the amendment I am offering to strike what are known as reconciliation instructions from the budget proposal. The reason I will be focused this morning on that is that it is absolutely key that we pass this amendment in order to get bipartisan tax reform. The fact is that reconciliation is an on-ramp to the most partisan process around, and the history of successful tax reform is in our working in a bipartisan way. For example, that is what the late President Reagan worked to do in 1986 with a whole host of Democrats, and they came up with a lot of very important, bold, progressive ideas. They chose to actually treat income from a wage in the same way as one would treat income from investments so as to send, in one fell swoop, a message that working-class people would get a fair shake, that the tax law was not about the 1 percent back then but that it was about working-class people. The middle class drives 70 percent of the American economy. They were not talking about massive tax handouts to big corporations and the wealthy; they were talking about the fact that, in our country, economic success is built around a thriving middle class--a middle class that can buy homes and cars and educate kids and pay for essentials.…”