Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to act together in a bipartisan fashion to improve the state of our Nation's infrastructure. It is long overdue. This week is National Infrastructure Week where we recognize the challenges we face in addressing America's transportation systems, its water systems, its ports, its harbors. Sadly, what we have to recognize isn't particularly positive. This year, the infrastructure grade that we received from America's Society of Civil Engineers, a national organization that is made up of some of the best and the brightest engineers in our country, gave our Nation a D-plus. That is not a good grade. Never has been. As a matter of fact, this same organization has estimated that, to rectify our Nation's infrastructure, we need to invest over $1 trillion, $1 trillion of new investments, to provide the sort of transportation, water and ports and harbors, that our Nation needs and deserves. So we must do better than a D-plus. Literally, we are living off the investments that our parents and our grandparents made a generation and two ago, and it is an aging infrastructure. We know from our country's history that the infrastructure projects that move forward most effectively are those combined with local, State, and Federal funding; all the governments doing their part with private participation.…”