Political Quotes

“I hope this is viewed universally as a commonsense, bipartisan amendment. I urge all of my colleagues to support this amendment through the rollcall vote which we will have. It is very simple, very basic, and I think very appropriate. It says that for the most serious crimes that exist--violent crimes, crimes against women and children, very serious crimes by anyone's definition--these will be disqualifiers for Federal housing assistance. I bring this amendment for two simple reasons. First, I think this should go hand in hand with committing those extremely serious crimes. Again, we are not talking about threshold crimes. We are not talking about first-time drug offenses. We are talking about aggravated sexual abuse, murder, sexual exploitation of children, violence against women. Those are the four big categories, very serious, very violent crimes. Usually, these are crimes focused on some of the most vulnerable in our society, such as children and abused women. I think it is very reasonable and common sense to say these crimes have very serious consequences. One of those--the most obvious is a stiff jail sentence, in some cases life. But one of those consequences is also going to be the Federal taxpayer is not going to give you housing or give you help for housing. There is a second equally, maybe more, important reason to support this commonsense disqualifier.…”