Mark Kelly

I think last year when President Trump talked about this war on drugs, he had talked about nonaddictive painkillers because we are a Nation now of dependence or codependence.

What we really need Anderson, is we need leadership. You know, we need people who we elect to office to say, hey I'm not going to do the most politically expedient thing. I'm going to do the right thing.

We've got to convince them to have the courage to them stand up and do what's right.

We need the people we elect to office to first stand up and acknowledge that we have a problem in this country, 35,000 people dying from gunshot wounds, another 100,000 shot every year is completely unacceptable, it's a problem.

If we don't start looking at the economic impact, when we start to lose American jobs ... then I think we are missing the entire boat.

I think sometimes we forget in government that our purpose is to serve the people, not them to serve our agency.

Would it reduce the backlog? I don't want to hear about things in totality, because that is how we always get lost in this government.

This is not your problem. This is the problem with government.

How do we find 255,000 hours to spend on union activity when we have people waiting to hear their claim being processed?

I have an extremely hard time explaining to my constituents that call our office seeking help with their disability claims that taxpayer dollars are being spent to the tune of $16 million on union activities while they are waiting for a…

Meanwhile, I just read a report by the Social Security Commissioner's Office that last year, 2016, the agency spent over $16 million on union representational activities.

This is an incredible mountain we have to climb. That is thousands of western Pennsylvanians with their lives on hold for almost 2 years while their claim is being processed.

In looking over disability insurance statistics for my congressional district in western Pennsylvania, I noticed that the average processing time is much higher than the national average.

Now, as a person who has always been in the private sector, it is hard for me to understand that money is the answer to this.

As we listen to this, and again, it does come down, as Mr. Renacci was talking about, to the amount of money we have to work with and then the size of the Social Security Administration.

I think the reliability of a trade partner, which has been brought into question, is also at stake right now.

I believe that the way we treat this NAFTA negotiation is an opportunity for us to establish ourselves as an extremely reliable trade partner.

NAFTA has been very good in a lot of cases, has it not?

A lot of the jobs we have lost, have not been because of trade agreements. A lot of them have been because of tax policy and regulation policy.

I think it is pretty hard to look at six months of the Trump Administration and come up with some kind of a definitive idea that they haven't gotten things done yet.

I have seen no evidence that we can't trust Canadian courts.

We are a bipartisan Committee, and we are about the people's work.

We cannot afford for these things to do that, and I know it was not necessarily on your watch, but that does not alleviate the responsibility going forward to make sure that it does not happen worse on your watch.

I, with the Congress, with the people of this great Nation, will not be intimated by cowards.

It is imperative that we continue to reinvest in this program because, as most people say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.