Jay Rockefeller: “I would like to see, as the Senator from Washington indicated, a very modest bill which would be signed by the President…”

“I would like to see, as the Senator from Washington indicated, a very modest bill which would be signed by the President to go forward. And I, after 11 years of working on this, am not willing to give up. I am not willing to say that I am going to put product liability to death. I am not going to be a part of that. I will, therefore, vote no on this cloture vote because I still think that, arguments about politics to the contrary, neither side having totally clean hands on all of this, the controlling factor ought to be the substance of the bill, which I think is good, and that the controlling factor on a vote ought to be how one feels about whether or not one can continue to debate product liability and hope that the leadership will come together in some kind of an arrangement, as, indeed, in this sort of Kabuki dance there has been.”