Political Quotes

“Mr. President and colleagues, Chairman Hatch was on the floor a bit ago talking about the Children's Health Insurance Program. Because his remarks were greatly misleading, I thought it was important--having heard my good friend, my longtime friend, earlier, I thought it was important to come to the floor this afternoon and set the record straight about the Children's Health Insurance Program. The fact is, the chairman and I did negotiate an important Children's Health Insurance Program extension back in September--bipartisan--and I put in a lot of time, both inside this Congress and outside the Halls of Congress, in order to line up bipartisan support for that effort. And we did, in fact, in the Finance Committee, have near unanimous bipartisan support. That was months and months ago. The fact is, at that point, the Children's Health Insurance Program could have passed the Congress within days, but unfortunately the Republicans in the other body had some other ideas. From the moment the Senate Finance Committee passed the bill in a bipartisan way, the kids became hostage to the Republican political agenda. First, the House Republicans tried to force ideological cuts in important health programs, including Medicare, in order to allow this deal to go forward. Then they conditioned helping the vulnerable kids on kicking Americans off their private health insurance. When that didn't work, they took yet another hostage: vaccines and preventive health.…”