Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator. He knows how affectionate I am toward him as a friend. I appreciate that friendship and that willingness in a bipartisan way--even when we had all kinds of thorny issues, such as national missile defense in the Armed Services Committee--that the two of us could work it out. Florida Everglades Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about the Everglades, and I need to start by saying that the Army Corps of Engineers began releasing water from Lake Okeechobee into the two rivers on either side of the lake. The problem is that we have a dike--not like the one that Mother Nature intended, where the whole surrounding of Lake Okeechobee, which is the largest lake in Florida, was nothing but a marsh. That is how Mother Nature had it. But after people moved in--and then in the late 1920s, the hurricane that drowned 2,000 people--we came in there and diked all the way around it. Well, the dike is only so structurally sound so that as the water rises in the lake, there is more water pressure on the sides, and if you start getting above 15 feet of depth of the lake, we have to worry about the dike collapsing and all the flooding of the surrounding towns and people and farmlands. So you get the picture. So the Army Corps of Engineers has to give some relief. So they release water to the east into the St. Lucie River and to the west into the Caloosahatchee River, and as a result, it relieves the dike pressure problem.…”