Political Quotes

“Madam Chair, I plan to withdraw this amendment. I had planned to from the beginning. What I wanted to do was come down here and explain the spoils system that this kind of earmarking represents. The problem, the gentleman mentioned that this amendment is crafted in a way that it would prohibit the spending of money on these projects. It would. The problem is there is no way to craft an amendment that wouldn't do that. What we have here is a situation where we simply can't go in and say this is a good earmark and this is not, not through this process. That's part of the whole flawed aspect of what we are doing here and why we need to change this. But the gentleman is correct, we shouldn't give the administration a free ride to say this is where things ought to be spent. We have the power of the purse. This is article I stuff, and we ought to exercise it. The problem I have is we basically exercise authority over that much of it and leave the administration with this, instead of saying, through the process of authorization, appropriation, and oversight, we have more control of what the administration is doing. Instead, we say we don't like the way you are spending this money--we say that to the executive branch--so we are going to run a little parallel track in the Congress where we determine where this much goes. Then when we determine where this much goes, 51 percent of it goes to just 13 percent of this body.”