Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding. I come to the floor troubled, considerably troubled by--and in opposition to the rule--by this Pigford settlement proposal that we've heard about just now. It was brought to my attention sometime after I was elected to Congress. I had a number of Iowa USDA employees that were deployed to Washington, D.C., and other locations to assist in administering the Pigford I settlement. They distributed $1.05 billion to African American farmers, some of whom were discriminated against. All of those that were discriminated against I would agree, I think with all of my colleagues, that they should be compensated to the degree that is practicable by law. However, as I sat down with the individuals that were administering the Pigford I settlement, and one of them came back with a box of file forms and applications sick to his stomach and told me that he had been compelled to engage in a practice that he believed was 75 percent fraudulent at a minimum, I thought that was a high and shocking number and put the information away until it emerged again and again in this Congress. It emerged before the Judiciary Committee in hearings before the committee on Pigford II to open it up again. There, the president of the Black Farmers Organization, John Boyd, testified under oath that there are 18,000 black farmers.…”