Thomas Daschle: “I was hoping that one of my colleagues would ask it, because obviously it is an issue that has come up before. We made a…”

“I was hoping that one of my colleagues would ask it, because obviously it is an issue that has come up before. We made a very calculated decision in the beginning of the last Congress that we were not going to be able to do both health care and the minimum wage. Obviously, if we could have done both and had the agreement of our Republican colleagues to do both, we would very much have wanted to be able to do that. But we decided that at best--at best--we were going to be able to pass a bill that does a lot more than 90 cents for the American worker. So what we decided to do--and people could accuse us of being conservative here and not wanting to do both--but what we decided to do, in a conservative approach to our agenda, was to say, ``Look, we'll take this one step at a time. Let's pass health care. Let's find a way to deal with health care that will affect every one of our workers in a monetary, as well as a personal way.''”