Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his call on this place to get back to regular order and to bridge our differences. I think it is an important one and a noble and hopefully easy request for us to ultimately follow. I came down here this weekend to talk about a young woman in Bridgeport, CT, who is at the epicenter of the fallout of this shutdown, and I wanted to come back down on Monday to tell her story very briefly once again because the way a lot of trade papers cover this shutdown makes it seem as if this is just about politics. If you listen to some commentators and some members of the tea party crowd in the House of Representatives, they will tell you that what we are going to find in this shutdown is that everybody is going to learn that the government really doesn't do that much and it is not that big a deal if it goes away for a couple of months, a couple of weeks, a couple of days. What we are finding as we enter week 2 of this shutdown is we have now moved past the point where the collapse of the government is just an inconvenience. It is now ruining lives. I wish Melanie Rhodes was the exception, but she is increasingly becoming the rule across the country. The Presiding Officer heard me tell her story this weekend, but I am going to do it again. Melanie was homeless a couple years ago. She lives in the southwestern portion of Connecticut.…”