Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would like to thank the ranking member, Mr. Garamendi from California. He was great to work with on this. We had some disagreements, but we agree on the majority of it. I would like to thank you for your support. It was great working with you, and we will do it more in the future. I would also like to take into account what Mr. Garamendi said about an icebreaker. America is the only Arctic nation with no icebreaker. We don't have one. China has them; Russia has them; Canada has them. Just about everybody else that has any Arctic in its sphere of influence has an icebreaker, except for the United States; meaning, if an American oil ship got stuck in the Arctic, guess who would bail them out? Our good friend the Russians, maybe our good friends the Communist Chinese. The Canadians, if we are lucky, will have a ship available so we can at least go with a free country if we had to get that ship out of trouble. We don't have an icebreaker. That is a travesty. Icebreakers are expensive, especially if you just buy one. They are about a billion dollars by the Coast Guard's account. There are other options to get an icebreaker. You can lease an icebreaker like you lease a car, and it can be operated by merchant mariners, the same ones that we have been praising. Talking about this bill, that is who could run this icebreaker.…”