Political Quotes

“Once again, I commend our fighting forces for their service to this country and to the cause of freedom. The freedom they worked and fought for is embodied in the constitutional system we enjoy in this country. Few votes that we have taken in this body will affect our constitutional system of freedom more than the vote that we take tomorrow on health care. And I would like to show, Madam Speaker, the bills that we have in front of us and the--I think--short time that we've unfortunately had to review them. Sitting here are the various bills from the House and Senate, the reconciled version, and the committee reports. These total more than 6,200 pages. We've had a brief 72 hours to review these materials by the time our vote rolls around, projected for tomorrow afternoon. That is simply not the way we should do business in the people's House. If we take 72 hours and subtract 8 hours a day for sleeping so you don't get burnt out completely, in that remaining 48 hours, you could read about two pages a minute if you read from morning until night, and then you would get through these 6,000 pages. You probably couldn't look up very many of the citations, though. That slows you down a bit further. But this is what we are faced with when we have our vote tomorrow. I think we really should have a different and better process, and the American people deserve better.”