Political Quotes

“this is a debate that is virtually identical to the debate we engaged in last night at a rather late hour with the Senator from Florida on his amendment. His amendment removes all the provisions dealing with legal immigrants from the bill, for current participants in the welfare system and future participants in the welfare system. What the Feinstein amendment does is simply makes the provisions in the bill prospective but grandfathers in everybody who is in the system. The Graham amendment, to my understanding, was going to reduce the savings in the budget by somewhere from $16 to $18 billion. My understanding is the Feinstein amendment reduces the savings in the reconciliation bill from $10 to $12 billion. It is still a dramatic revenue loss. As was in the case of the Graham bill, in the Feinstein bill there are no offsets. This is just a reduction in savings, going to pay for legal immigrants to continue to receive welfare benefits. Let me, for the benefit of those who were not up at 11:30 last night listening to this debate, go through how the underlying bill works and, in fact, a little bit of the history of the underlying provisions in this act, the underlying bill. What is in this legislation before us are provisions that were passed in H.R. 4 last year and passed both the House and Senate. They were in the Senate bill that passed the Senate last year 87 to 12.”