Political Quotes

“in the last Congress we had a debate about minimum wage. There were many people in the Republican leadership that got up and took the well and said that they were opposed to increasing the minimum wage. It caused me at that point to muse that somewhere between Abraham Lincoln and Newt Gingrich the Republican Party had changed its opinion of slavery. Eventually we decided in a bipartisan fashion to give America's lowest paid workers a raise. We increased the minimum wage. Now as we are in the process of getting some 1 million people from welfare into workfare by a time certain, the Republicans have changed their mind again. They have decided that slave labor guaranteed by the Federal Government is all right, that those people that we are moving from welfare to workfare should not be paid a minimum wage. We are time-limiting their welfare benefits, forcing them into the work force but not guaranteeing them a minimum wage. Thus we are trapping those same people economically. This really is a Republican version of the old company store, when at the end of the year the workers owed the company store more than they had paid; so what we are telling these people is: At the end of the year, you will owe us for the benefit we gave you of being able to work. To the Republicans I say, ``Get real.''”