Political Quotes

“I would say to my friend from Arizona and to the leader that a cynic might also raise the issue of why it took the President 454 days to nominate Donald Berwick and then have a lot of his surrogates go on in front of the media and say: We had to do this because we needed to get this position filled. Madam President, 454 days--if this position was so critical and so important to this country, you would think they would have moved in a more expeditious fashion to get a nominee out there. They did not even have a hearing in front of the committee. They could have had a hearing. They could have had a vote at the committee level. They could have brought him to the floor. They did not do any of those things that would be called for in the regular order because, as I think the Senator from Kentucky has pointed out, they did not want to take a tough political vote. When you look at this man's record and the things he has said about the British health care system and some of the other comments he has made--I want to point out something here too which I thought was sort of interesting because he is going to be called upon to implement a 2,700-page bill, which, when the regulations are written, is going to be thousands and thousands of pages, not to mention the fact that as we debated this on the floor of the Senate, it ended up being about $1 trillion, and when fully implemented $2.5 trillion. So he has trillions of dollars under his jurisdiction.…”