Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for yielding. Because the committee has long been known for bipartisan cooperation, when I first came on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, I was actually optimistic that we could work together to get a good bill to the full House. How naive of me to think that my Democrat colleagues would put aside their radical agenda to work with Republican Members to pass a sensible and affordable surface transportation bill. I can hardly overstate my disappointment that, from the very beginning, we were completely shut out of the process. I had hoped that the partisan nature of this surface transportation reauthorization would end after the bill was marked up in committee. Clearly, that was wishful thinking. While the entire transportation reauthorization process has been abused, it has served at least one good purpose in that it has put on full display the extreme ideas of my Democrat colleagues and just how destructive to the committee process they have become. Apparently, it wasn't enough to ram through a bill drafted without any input from Republican Members, which increased spending by 62 percent while our Nation is drowning in debt by adding a trillion dollars in miscellaneous spending to the proposal that already wasn't serious to begin with. My guess is that this is another Democrat bill that would have to be passed to find out exactly what is in it and what it will really cost American households.…”