Lloyd Bentsen: “once again our Republican colleagues have decided to choose politics over policy. And tonight, as we head into the next…”

“once again our Republican colleagues have decided to choose politics over policy. And tonight, as we head into the next morning, we are going to pass a bill that will never pass the other body. And, quite frankly, if it were to pass, I do not think it would have much effect on the general economy. In fact, we were asked to pass a $1.3 trillion tax bill earlier this year that was supposed to stimulate the economy at that point in time, when it was apparent that we were heading into a recession, and all we saw that happened was that the recession got deeper and the deficit appeared and the surplus went away. Our colleague from New York says this bill is only going to cost $150 billion, not $270 billion. But, of course, he is forgetting about the fact we are going to have to borrow another $115 billion of debt when we should have been paying down the national debt. Now, if we really wanted to have a stimulus bill that would have some economic effect, and I am glad to see our Republican friends have all become Keynesians, I thought they were monitorists, but now they are Keynesians this week, what we would do is extend the unemployment benefits for 26 weeks, because we know we are going to have a longer recession than what was projected; and we would do the COBRA extension, like has been discussed. And if the Republicans are really serious about trying to transform health care and they care about the 45 percent who are not in COBRA, well maybe we could do that also.”