Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I want to add my words in support of this bill. It is a lot easier, it turns out, for the Members on both sides of the House, Democratic and Republican and across the ideological spectrum, to abolish a program in principle than to abolish it in fact. We hear a great deal of talk about abolition but when we get to abolishing any specific program, it will have liberal and conservative defenders, it will have Democratic and Republican defenders. This is one where we also fortunately have a bipartisan coalition for the abolition. The time has come, clearly, to abolish it. If we cannot at this point dispense with the helium reserve, the purpose of which is no longer valid, then we cannot undo anything. Members who represent the area where it is involved, and they will be legitimately representing their interests, they will raise some objections. It is true that it would be a lot cleaner to do this if we never had a helium reserve in the first place. It is true that solutions to problems cannot be qualitatively more elegant than the problems themselves. When we have an entity, we have always some details to decide when we abolish it. Nonetheless, abolition is clearly the sensible way to go.”