Political Quotes

“Reserving the right to object, the Senator from Vermont made a couple of statements that I would just like to repeat the words: that we are in a crisis; this is an emergency; we can't turn our backs on the suffering. I agree. I have agreed for months. But he also said something that is completely incorrect. You might call it a lie. He said that Republicans have done nothing. That is not true. I was on daily calls during the August recess after we had attempted and were debating internally a trillion-dollar package at the tail end of July before the August recess, recognizing--and I was one of the ones pointing out--the fact that we had already passed, as the good Senator from Vermont said, over $3 trillion in four different COVID relief financial packages early in the pandemic. At that point in time, there was $1.2 trillion of that unspent. A big chunk of that wasn't even obligated. Today, as we stand here debating this now, we still have a little under $600 billion unspent and unobligated. So the point I was making to my Republican colleagues during those last few weeks in July and those conference calls in August was, before we authorize any more money, before we further mortgage our children's future, why don't we first repurpose and redirect what we already passed because what we passed, we passed very quickly because we had to.…”