Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I look forward to this hour, although I will probably take something less than that. I want to bring to the attention of the House and, more beyond that, the citizens of the United States what is happening here with all this talk about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. I want to spend some time on that issue. I want to review exactly what the Affordable Care Act has done for Americans and what the repeal would do to Americans. Those are really two different ways to look at this. I want to start someplace else that has been a very special part of my thinking about government issues, about policies of all kinds, and it was something that Franklin Delano Roosevelt said during the height of the Depression as the American government and Mr. Roosevelt were talking about the various policies that were being discussed at the time. He laid out a test to which he would apply his judgment of a policy. It reads this way: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is rather we provide enough for those who have too little.'' I see this as a profound and extremely important criteria upon which to judge many policies that come before us in bills, but it is also, I think, an extremely valuable way to judge the question of the Affordable Care Act: Has it added much to those who have little? I will try to answer that in a few moments.…”