Political Quotes

“But ``compromise'' is not a dirty word in my lexicon. Compromise is absolutely necessary. There are things in the bill that I would have written differently. In the conference committee, there are going to be differences between the House and the Senate in how we do. You have mentioned some of the issues. The environmental issues, some of them are controversial. But there is a major part of this bill to speed these projects forward and to hold the Corps of Engineers responsible for getting things done. Part of it is they have got 3 years to do the initial study, and they have got $3 million to get that study done, and their feet are going to be held to that commitment to get these projects moving forward. So there is a lot of reform in here, in the bureaucracy of the way this system has worked. There is also a lot of reform in this on allowing the local partnerships. All of these programs are partnerships. They are partners with the local governments, ports, as you described earlier, local levee districts, and the like. Those partnerships, under present law, have a very difficult time to start a program early, to get it going without the Corps' permission. So what we have, we call it ``crediting.'' And that allows these local governments, local ports to begin a project. Eventually, there is a whole new process in here for selecting which projects will be done. By the way, we are not going to do earmarks. There are no earmarks in this legislation.…”