William Tauzin: “You know, the freshmen, Jon, all of you guys, have taken a lot of heat in the press, being too hardnosed, too rigid…”

“You know, the freshmen, Jon, all of you guys, have taken a lot of heat in the press, being too hardnosed, too rigid, inflexible. The truth is, the freshmen came to this House with a very refreshing concept. It was a concept that the Government ought to be our servant, not our master. And you came with a simple notion that we needed to make Government user friendly again. It needed to be responsive to people and helpful to people, instead of control and mandating and, indeed, inaccessible to people because its formularies and regulations were too difficult for people to understand. It is a very refreshing attitude. I often comment to folks back home, thank God we have a huge crop of freshmen that have that attitude. I think it is great that we have the infusion of new ideas and new thought. We have seen it in the form of a willingness to tackle issues that sometimes no one wanted to tackle before; to face head on the crush and calamity of Medicare collapsing into bankruptcy and to try to deal with it, to face head on the fact we have got a welfare system that is condemning people to dependency, instead of rescuing them from dependency; to face head on the fact that Medicaid in our country is about to cripple the ability of our States to take care of people who are uninsured and need the assistance of others for their health care; and to face head on complex issues like immigration policy, and issues like, indeed, environmental reform, which are very contentious and very diffic…”