Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady from Tennessee for yielding time. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor to rise in support of this bill. The Federal Government has a few constitutional duties, and we seem to have taken on a lot of Federal responsibilities. As time goes on, every time we see a need, we think we have to tap into the taxpayers and create another government function. But this is not one of those functions that is an enumerated power of the United States Congress. It is not something that we are compelled to do. It is something that is discretionary. We are into operations at a time of austerity, a time when we see what's happened as a prelude to the American economy, if we just look over to Europe, in places like, oh, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain, for example. That's the direction we're heading with our economy. And as we see this discretionary spending grow along with our entitlements grow and our economy contract, we also need to take a look at these items that are at our discretion as to whether or not to fund. I think that the image that we have seen on the videos tells us something about the internal culture of NPR. If you haven't seen the videos, or if you've just seen the little text in there, that doesn't give you the real sense of what was going on in that conversation with Mr. Schiller at that table for 2 hours that day.…”