Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from Illinois, Mr. Durbin, for his interest and participation in this issue, his ability to explain it, and for the way he has brought a lot of people along in helping out with this bill. He has been a great replacement, and we have made more progress than we ever have in the other 14 years of working on the bill. So I thank him for that and for his ability to explain things so clearly. I also want to thank Senator Lamar Alexander who helped us change this bill in the last year from about an 80-page bill to an 11-page bill and made it States rights. As Senator Durbin so eloquently explained, this takes action by the States. This is just to clear up the Quill case that made it a little confusing about whether they could charge a tax and then challenged Congress to fix the problem. The solution Senator Alexander came up with condensed the bill considerably and made it a lot easier. But it made it a States rights issue so that the States have to take some action. I thank Senator Heitkamp as well. She is brandnew to the bill but has more years of experience than anybody because she was a part of the Quill case when it came up. She was representing North Dakota in that case, and that is the other side of the case. She can explain the intricacies of that and the challenge we were given, and the number of reasons why it didn't happen earlier.…”