Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him for his excellent work in bringing this bipartisan legislation to the floor. With all due respect to Mr. Goodlatte, I credibly come to the floor to say that this bill does not provide the funding that we need to address the opioid crisis in our country. I thank Mr. Upton again. I know this is his last year as chairman of the committee. I thank him for his openness, his willingness to work in a bipartisan way, and I do think that this is a good piece of legislation. It is lacking one thing: the resources to get the job done. I also come to the floor as an appropriator, and to hear Mr. Goodlatte say what is coming out of here and coming out of there, in our subcommittee on Labor/HHS, we call it the lamb-eat-lamb committee because there was no good place to take money from. We had carefully and economically husbanded the resources in such a way, when we did budget agreements, to use the money very well for its purposes: the investments in education and health, et cetera. So when an emergency comes along like the opioid epidemic, like Zika, like Flint, these are emergencies, and by tradition, this House has always declared emergencies--whether a natural disaster or otherwise-- to say that funding would not be lamb-eat-lamb within the appropriations process and take funds from very needed initiatives that Congress had agreed to in our own authorizations otherwise.…”