Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we rise to express our disappointment with what just took place. I am one of the authors of the underlying bill. I think it is a very good piece of legislation, but it would make a very significant difference if it had some funding. The simple fact that we have to face is this bill has no funding right now. I know colleagues on the other side have come to the floor to say there is funding--$80 million, $400 million--but in point of fact I must disagree with them. Let me list the points that show, I believe, why there is no funding to this bill at this point. The first is that the funding they point to was passed out of the Appropriations subcommittee 7 months before this bill even had its markup. It would have been an astonishing feat of prediction to be able--back then--to fund this bill now. If that weren't clear enough, there was a change in the bill between then and now. Then, if you wished to fund this bill, you would have put the bulk of the money through the CJS Appropriations Subcommittee because the bulk of this bill was written in the CJS Appropriations Subcommittee. We only changed it this January in response to Republican objections that nobody wanted to create new programs. So we rerouted the new programs through existing programs. That is when it became a Labor-HHS-dominated bill. So there is no way that last June, when this money came through that Appropriations subcommittee, they knew it was going to this.…”