Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for allowing me to speak tonight. I didn't get to go to Congressman Grijalva's funeral last week because I had to be here for a committee hearing. If he was around, he would have wanted me to stay here and be at that hearing and give them hell. That is exactly what I did, and he would have been extremely proud of that. I really wanted to talk about whom I meet when I was just out of graduate school. I was a legislative assistant for Hilda Solis. I was the lowest ranking staffer on her team, and I got the chance to meet Raul Grijalva when he was a Member of Congress and I was just a legislative assistant. To the extent I walked into the office, I would kind of go wandering around the halls and go and say hello and try to go just to see whom I could become friends with. I met his chief of staff at that time. She said out of the blue: Why don't you come in and say hello to the Congressman? They pulled me into the office. I was just a kid who had been here a few months. Raul sat with me and just had a conversation of who I was, why I was fighting for my community, and why did I want to be in this business. That interaction really did sit with me for a number of years. That is because I didn't have a title. I was not anybody special, and I wasn't anybody in particular. I was a kid that wandered into his office and tried to get a meeting with him because I said: Why not? He is a Member of Congress, but he comes from a similar background.…”