Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman from Illinois for organizing this Special Order here today and for committing one hour of floor time to the discussion of the farm bill and the need to get one passed. Mr. Speaker, we don't get very many debates on agriculture here in the House of Representatives, and fewer and fewer people actually represent agriculture districts. There has been not so much a migration of people from the farms, although that has happened, but a concentration of people in the cities, and they lose track of where their food comes from and what it takes to produce that food. So we are here at this point, and I want to start off with the remarks of the gentleman from Illinois with regard to crop insurance. I am going to pull these numbers from memory, and anyone can go back and check them, but they're going to be conceptually accurate and, perhaps, even precisely right. If my memory serves me, back during some of those years when it couldn't rain--and that existed back in the eighties--it seems to me that, in 1988, we had 13 percent of the producers who actually had crop insurance. Since that time--from that time forward until this modern era--there were disaster payments after disaster payments. For any place that had a drought, for any place that had a flood, there was a discussion in Congress, and sometimes those disaster areas got rolled up together.…”