Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. H.R. 2769 offers the House an opportunity to go back to our constituents who are asking this question when we are out and about at home: What in the world is the House of Representatives doing about the IRS scandals? There is a series of scandals that we've heard about that we've heard testimony from in both the Ways and Means Committee, on which I and the ranking member serve, and also the Government Oversight Committee--and my suspicion is maybe some other committees of the House. But when our constituents say, What in the world are you doing?, this bill that we are discussing is part of that remedy. Here is one of the things that we have come to learn, Mr. Speaker: We've come to learn that the Inspector General, the Treasury Inspector General for tax administration, did an audit; and in the course of the audit discovered that there were funds that were being misused in the context of conferences. Some of them were conferences that looked at, even in the most favorable light, even if you were looking at it in the most favorable light from an IRS point of view, were clearly gratuitous and an abuse and overspending. Some of this had to do with videos that were videos of parodies of the television show ``Star Trek'' and, actually, I think a bunch of nonsense. Some of it had to do with the purchasing of trinkets. Some of it had to do with overspending.…”