Eleanor Holmes Norton

I am just trying to allow them to grow like any business would like to grow.

I think there are worse problems here.

If we do not pass a postal bill, a lot of the testimony we are hearing today may be quite moot.

The Republican budget, both last year and this year, cuts enormously, and even this year even more enormously, domestic programs, while increasing the Pentagon budget.

Some had looked at the cuts, certainly the 10-year cuts, as opportunities to look at the untouchable budget, the Defense Department budget.

I just want to clarify that my good colleague on the other side indicated, and it is very important, these differences, that the OMB indicated that you should continue to spend at normal rates because we were five months away from the…

We should not be surprised by the scope of the damage that sequester will bring.

First, I want to thank my friend for keeping jobs before us. That's the bottom line. That's really what we've been talking about even as we talk about the Ryan budget. I simply wanted to come forward because, when I heard you on the floor…

I'm very glad my good friend from California does have a way to illustrate all of these points. Not only does Ryan reduce the top rate from 39.6--that's how much the very richest would pay--to 25 percent, but you may say, well, but he's…

I do want to point out, when you talk about the transfer of the expense, the cost of Medicare to seniors themselves--the costs we know they can't possibly bear--notice that hopes went up when Mitt Romney said, during the campaign, that we…

Isn't that, by the way, exactly why we got Medicare--that seniors were left to the private market, and finally the Congress understood that the private market cannot accommodate people with $22,000 annual income.

I think that point you just made about Medicaid needs to be said again. People think of Medicaid as somehow poor people, we'll let them fend for themselves. It turns out that almost all of the funds--two-thirds--go to seniors and disabled…

The linking of the 2.5 miles from the beltway, to deliberately exclude most of the District of Columbia was an affront, frankly.

Snow is keeping Federal workers at home today, and Congress will keep up to a million at home with the sequester cuts in today's CR. No emergency like snow or even the deficit will be responsible. The responsibility lies with the House…

Good luck to the GSA if they can make the agencies do that.

Well, why don't you call the question on this? I looked at your report.

I am saying that you are not going to get an inventory, you are not going to get anything until somebody can say here is a system, this is how we count.

I think we would have benefitted if, in the process of considering our bills, we had collaborated with the Senate.

Good luck with that approach.

We need a push from someone that says you have the solution right there before you, go at it.

Somebody has to move off their duff and get us moving on these bills and get the Administration to say, look, you are close together, let's get together and let's negotiate these out and get the job done.

It is very frustrating to hear the piecemeal approach.

I don't accept that the present budget process is at all responsive to this new world of climate change.

Climate change is not political, and we make it political at our own risk.

It amazes me how little innovation there has been in the work we have done in financing infrastructure.