Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I want to respond to the gentlelady. The gentlelady says that I am criticizing pollinators or beer distillers or whomever. I'm not. I'm just saying the Congress doesn't need to congratulate everybody who wins a championship or everybody who distills beer. I mean, it's just nutty for us to spend so much time on these things and then say, I'm sorry, we don't have time for Members to offer amendments on appropriation bills to actually strike spending so that we're not borrowing 43 cents on every dollar that we spend this year. Let me mention why it is that the leadership and the Appropriations Committee may not be so anxious for Members to debate these bills-- because there are a lot of earmarks in them. This chart shows 11 of the 12 appropriation bills that have gone through either the subcommittee or committee. It looks like a hungry Pacman here, but what this shows in the red is the percentage of earmark dollars associated with powerful Members of Congress. That includes members of the Appropriations Committee, members of leadership, or chairmen of committees. That represents about 13 percent of this body. Yet, when you look at the number of earmark dollars or percentage of earmark dollars, Homeland Security, that 13 percent is garnering 52 percent of the earmark dollars.…”