Political Quotes

“I come to the floor this afternoon, in the presence of Senator Coburn of Oklahoma and Senator Harkin of Iowa, to discuss an issue I have worked on literally for my entire congressional career--food safety. This is an issue which has haunted me since my days in the House of Representatives when I received a letter from a woman in Chicago, far outside of my central Illinois congressional district, who told me the story of her 6-year-old son Alex. She brought home a pound of hamburger from the local grocery store and fed it to her son, and he was dead 3 days later from food contamination that led to a very painful, horrible death which has haunted her to this day. Her name is Nancy Donnelly. She has focused her life on making food safety laws better in America. I have joined her in that effort. I was inspired by her tragedy and by the many people who came to me and explained how they had been through similar circumstances. For almost 20 years now, I have been taking on this issue. I have tried from the very beginning to bring to the attention of Members of Congress the fact that there are at least 12 different food safety agencies in our Federal Government. When we look to the origin of these, the U.S. Department of Agriculture got started because Upton Sinclair wrote ``The Jungle,'' which told about the horrible circumstances in the packinghouses of Chicago. That novel led Congress to pass the first food safety law with the U.S.…”