Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, in closing, I thank Chairman McCaul and Ranking Member Meeks for working with me to move this important legislation to the floor. I share many of the comments that my friend, the ranking member from New York, just stated. We do need to invest. We need to invest in the tools of diplomacy that we have to counter PRC malign influence in the world. We need to support the China transformational exports program with the Export-Import Bank. We need to support the Development Finance Corporation. We need to support USAID where it can help and the Peace Corps where it can help with soft power. We need diplomacy. We need foreign deployed foreign service personnel. However, we have to remember that we cannot counter and we should not attempt to counter Communist China by becoming more like China. We have a $35 trillion national debt, Mr. Speaker. Spending money like drunken sailors without any accountability and without any effective strategy is not effective diplomacy in countering the malign influence from China. While I certainly do support the PRC malign influence fund, for goodness' sake, we are the Congress. We control the purse strings. Let's do our job. Let's create an authorization, put some guardrails around it and not allow the administration to spend this country into bankruptcy. That is the fastest way to lose the competition to China.…”