Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), the ranking member of the Resources Committee. Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I thank my friend and colleague for yielding that time. Well, another day, another giveaway. Pretty ironic: here we are, we're about to get into a massive fight over whether or not we should increase the debt limit of the United States or default on our obligations, which involves many trillions of dollars, and today we're going to give away a taxpayer asset that is worth billions of dollars. We're going to give it away. Oh, we're going to get some pretty land in exchange. That's valuable. That's nice. But, you know, for many billions of dollars, we could probably buy a lot more land if we wanted it, or we could have a little debt reduction. I had a simple amendment. My amendment would have said that we would charge an 8 percent royalty. Eight percent of the value of the copper coming from these publicly-owned lands would be paid to the Treasury of the United States of America. And guess what? The Republicans didn't allow the amendment. What are they afraid of? They're afraid that maybe some of their Tea Party types over there might vote for it? You want to run government like a business, don't give away assets. That's what we're doing here. You would still get the jobs. Now, you know, this bill contains sort of a bizarre--they're saying, oh, we're going to get some money maybe, sort of, kind of.…”