i hope that everyone understands what obstructionism is. this is obstructionism at its best, and it goes along with what the republicans said they wanted to do and that is stop everything. as indicated in "roll call" newspaper last week. this is a bill that saves the government money, almost a half a billion dollars over ten years. it would create in the first year of the -- after passage of the bill 40,000 jobs. the republicans just killed th this. over the most fictitious amount of reasoning. they said they weren't allowed to offer amendments. that, madam president, is absolutely false. in fact, we had -- we had an agreement that they could offer amendments. there were no restrictions on what they offered. they wanted to offer amendments regarding tarp. they wanted to offer five of those. fine, i said, go ahead. we had one amendment we wanted to offer. they said, no, we want to just offer ours; you can't offer yours. every state would benefit from this piece of legislation because tourism is so pop expler so important -- popular and so im