Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to talk about the challenges facing our country and the world with the recent outbreak of the coronavirus. This disease presents a serious threat that I think requires a proactive approach in a bipartisan fashion. Unfortunately, the mechanisms put in place by the previous administration, the Obama administration, to deal with pandemics like this have been dismantled over the last year. They were put in place to deal with the Ebola crisis and the SARS crisis years ago and to ensure that in the future, if possible pandemics occurred, we would be prepared. In 2018, the President fired the entire pandemic response team. In the President's 2021 budget request, he proposed cutting over $700 million to the Centers for Disease Control. Hopefully, this proposal will be dead on arrival. In the face of this crisis, this is simply unacceptable. We need to be on guard. The social and economic impacts of this pandemic could be devastating globally, but the public health crisis affects all Americans. We have just had the first case, in the last 24 hours, in northern California that, it is believed, the cause, the origin, is from here in our country, not coming from China. We require a robust response. The Congress and the President need to work together in a bipartisan fashion to ensure the well-being, public health, and safety of the American people.…”