Political Quotes

“I rise to once again speak about where we are, where we ought to be, and where I hope we will be. It is now 8:30 in the evening. We are 3\1/2\ hours, essentially, until the government begins to shut down. Can we believe this? We are the United States of America. We are a superpower. We are supposed to be a nation governed by rule of law, and we are about to shut down--not shut us down because of a catastrophic event that hit us. It is not as if a meteor has streaked across the sky and hit the United States of America, taking out our power grid and rendering us powerless. It is not as if we have been hit by a global pandemic that would bring us to our knees. We are in a self-induced act, about to shut down the functioning of the government of the United States of America. I find this shocking. I have been through this in the mid-1990s. It is deeply disturbing to the people who work for the Federal Government, who get up every day and go to their job trying to perform a service or a function they consider important to the United States, whether it is in transportation, protecting the environment, Federal law enforcement, important financial regulatory agencies, such as our consumer protection agency or our financial services or the Consumer Product Safety Commission in my own State, which protects us and particularly our children against harmful products. So there are those functions that are going to be shut down.…”