Political Quotes

“Thank you to the gentleman from Indiana for yielding. I am here tonight to talk about the proper relationship between the Federal Government and State and local governments, this issue of Federalism, our Nation's founding documents. When I was first elected, I embarked on a listening tour right after November 2, during which I met with local officials from across my district to talk about issues that they were concerned about, what was on their minds, what challenges they were facing in their offices. At each stop, local leaders talked about the problems facing their communities; and even though every county is different, every community is different, the Federal Government seemed to cause the same problems in each one of them. In one county in my district, I was told a story by a county commissioner of the time that the commissioner asked his staff to count all of the Federal and State mandates that they placed upon their health and human services department at the county. They counted up the mandates that they were under from national, State regulators, Congress, State legislation, State legislatures. The county commissioner actually asked his staffer to quit counting when he reached 9,000 individual mandates that that one department, at the county level, was under.…”