Political Quotes

“Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas. I just think of Congressman Phil Gingrey, another doctor that engages in policy here, who once on this floor, probably at least once, said that when he is working in the emergency room and a patient comes in on a gurney and there's blood pouring off the gurney, you don't just go get the mop and the bucket and start to mop up the floor; you stop the bleeding first. Let's stop the bleeding at the border. I think how hard is it to secure this border? It is not that hard. With the resources that we have, we are spending today--this is a 2,000-mile border, it's not just a rounded number, I mean, it is right at 2,000 miles--we are spending over $6.5 million a mile on the southern border each and every year. So I look at that and I think, what are the economics of this? This is one of the advantages of being a ditch digger, a construction guy, because I figure this stuff out on what it cost to build things. We are building interstate highway through expensive Iowa cornfields for $4 million a mile, buying the right-of-way, doing the engineering, the archeological, environmental, the fencing, the seeding, the paving, the shouldering and the painting. All of that gets done for $4 million a mile, and we are spending $6.5 million a mile to guard a long barren desert that a lot of it doesn't even have one barbed wire fence on it. It's just got a concrete pile on from horizon to horizon--$6.5 plus million a mile. So think of that.…”