Political Quotes

“I respect the Senator from Arkansas. In the short time he has been in the Senate, he has been an outstanding leader on very important issues. He is a good Senator. I have watched him over the period of time he has been in the Senate, and I think this is the first time I felt he was wrong. But he has his rights. Juvenile judges are the ones who originally requested that Congress include a valid court order, or ``VCO,'' exception in the Federal juvenile justice statute, and they now are asking us to repeal it. We accorded great weight to the opinion of the National Council of Family and Juvenile Court Judges because their members are the ones who invoke this exception. As further noted this week by Elizabeth Pyke of the National Criminal Justice Association: ``No one on the state government side is arguing to keep the VCO. . . . All agree that the VCO is the wrong tool to get a child's attention. Holding them in detention for a status offense is no longer considered the best practice for scaring a kid into going straight . . . So parsing the language to allow judges to continue to use the VCO for punishment doesn't really make sense. And, again, no one in the states has argued for that.'' Detaining status offenders is not good public policy.…”