Political Quotes

On the recordDecember 11, 2018
I am grateful for the opportunity. There are so many things that we need to consider. Today, the President announced that he is going to do his best to shut down the Government of the United States, and he wants to call it the Trump shutdown. I wonder if he really understands what that means to Americans. The Department of Homeland Security--about which there is so much discussion as to the security of the border, the Coast Guard, all of the ICE agents and so forth--presumably would stand down. I guess that is what a shutdown means, that we would have no border security. So I am curious exactly what the President has in mind when he says it will be the Trump shutdown. We don't really want to do that. I have been there before in the mid- 1990s, when Speaker Gingrich decided to shut down the government. I was over at the Department of the Interior as the Deputy Secretary, and I think that the Department of National Parks and the Bureau of Land Management and on and on simply shut down. The National Parks shut down, the Washington Monument. So the Department of the Interior would apparently shut down--not apparently, would definitely shut down--under a Trump shutdown. I suppose the Washington Monument, the memorial to World War I, World War II memorials, Yosemite--that would be a problem actually. We usually go to Yosemite on the 18th of December. That is my anniversary. So, Mr. President, do you have any idea what you are going to cause here in America?…
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John Garamendi
Democratic · California

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