Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, my colleague is exactly right that the Financial Services Committee passed language that is similar in some respects to Representative Newhouse's bill just 6 months ago in the Consolidated Appropriations Act. That language reflected bipartisan work done by the Financial Services Committee on two Republican bills that had been marked up by our committee with unanimous votes. We continue to work in a bipartisan manner as well as with the Senate and the Treasury Department to get language that reflected these two bipartisan bills into the appropriations bill, which ultimately got passed into law. It is simply false to claim that the bill we are considering today is somehow a harmless duplication of what we have already enacted, as I have laid out in detail already. This bill undermines the bipartisan work that we have done on this issue and raises serious concerns about both national security and racial profiling. We already did the work to strike a reasonable bipartisan compromise on this front, but Republicans are choosing to undermine that bipartisanship with this bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Takano), the ranking member of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs.”