Political Quotes

“I appreciate the gentleman yielding, and I appreciate him bringing this up. Mr. Speaker, I really regret the fact that this has devolved into a big partisan debate or a big partisan discussion. Everyone in this Chamber supports the concept of infrastructure investment. That is not what this is about. That is not what this is about. All of us support infrastructure investment, and all of us agree that we have underfunded infrastructure, that we need more investment in infrastructure. In my home State, in Baton Rouge, in the capital region, we have the worst traffic in the Nation for a midsize city. Our people sit in traffic an average of 47 hours above the national average at home. It is ridiculous. Here is what is going on right now. Here is what is going on. The gas tax was set up to be a user fee. It was set up to be a user fee that the more you drove, the more you used the roads, the more you paid for it. That is the way that this is supposed to work. What has happened is that the President has come out and offered a proposal that disconnects the user fee. We support a user fee model. We support lock-boxing the dollars and making sure that they are dedicated to infrastructure as opposed to what has happened, for example, another issue that the sponsor of this legislation has worked on--the harbor maintenance trust fund--where billions of dollars have been charged on the auspices of one thing and diverted to something else.…”