Political Quotes

“I think for the next half hour Senator Merkley and I are going to have the opportunity to outline specifically how this affects small businesses in the real world. That has always been our concern. One of the proponents of the bill earlier today talked about big businesses and big businesses getting a free ride. That is not what this debate is all about if you are from Oregon or Montana or New Hampshire. What you are concerned about are your small businesses. These are innovators. They are people without lobbies and political action committees. They are small businesses. Someday they would like to be big, but they are trying to compete in a nationwide marketplace and they are overwhelmingly in opposition to this bill and for understandable reasons. They hear this is all about States rights and then they actually look at what this bill does and this bill coerces them to collect taxes for, in effect, thousands of jurisdictions around the country. It has been my interest, and I want to repeat it, to work out a compromise on this issue. Our side has put down on paper a number of proposals that we think ought to be the basis for trying to work out a position that would allow, from our standpoint, at least some semblance of a right for a State to make its own judgments and not be coerced into just going along with a piece of legislation that forces our small businesses to collect these taxes for everybody else.…”