Eleanor Holmes Norton

I want to thank my very good friend from Maryland, Congresswoman Edwards. It's so typical of her to come to the floor on an urgent issue like this. I have to chuckle when you say about my having been a tenured professor of law at…

I've come to the floor today to inform the Congress of exciting new developments about the major priority for the District of Columbia for this year's Congress. These developments have come very quickly, both in the Congress and in the…

I want to summarize how much on the same page Democrats and Republicans are on the proposition that D.C. should control D.C.'s local budget. There's nothing radical about that one, my friends. It would be hard to go out in the street of…

The final IG report found that expenditures related to the conference were, and here I am quoting, 'excessive, and wasteful, and that in many instances GSA followed neither Federal procurement laws nor its own policy in conferences.'

I have been trying to figure out how he became so powerful, if I may use that word.

Well, I thank the gentlelady for yielding. I did not know of the Emancipation Day of the Virgin Islands. I reciprocate and want to know more about the Virgin Islands' Emancipation Day. I want to thank the gentlelady from the Virgin Islands…

I am very, very concerned about the structure of the agency.

Ms. Johnson, you are very experienced in Government. This is why the President appointed you to be administrator of GSA.

In other words, you thought that the----

Could a courthouse be built in L.A. for $400 million today?

Just a moment, Ms. Johnson. Are you criticizing----

Do you think this courthouse should be built at all now that you are free of the post that you held at GSA?

And I do want to say for the record that the President took action without hesitation.

There have been only six leaders of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund since Thurgood Marshall first went on the bench. You can imagine what quality of lawyer it takes to fill the role that Thurgood Marshall had at the NAACP Legal Defense and…

The control board reached out to take control of the board of education. It had control of virtually every other arm of the D.C. government. But John Payton and the board of Appleseed knew that the law which set up the control board gave…

I would just like some clarification on the L.A. Courthouse. I mean, it goes back to my first days in the Congress.

I view that to read that you could not have put people on administrative leave and you could not have fired people until the final report.

If someone in Region 9 wanted to know whether or not what they were doing was within the rules under the present structure, would they turn to--who would they turn to in Region 9?

I believe in good personnel, but I don't believe that the Government or any other agency or private business can always assure that there will be precisely the people in charge who will keep things going.

So the counsel himself didn't want his opinion in writing?

I am going to have questions for Mr. Tangherlini and Ms. Johnson about the structure of GSA, which is very troubling in this regard.

Mr. Tangherlini has been the administrator of the District of Columbia, a very big and complicated city; done the same thing at Metro.

The judges have been a major factor in courthouse waste.

Even members of the Oversight Committee know the difference between a joke and corruption.

It is hard to understand why you would not have treated--and let me go to the bonus.