Political Quotes

“The Senator from Virginia also talked about phone calls. I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of phone calls coming into my office. We have even had to bring in, in some very emotional and highly charged situations, a suicide intervention team because of the desperation that we are facing. Not everybody is a high-paid Federal employee. One of my constituents, one of the nurses, got a paycheck yesterday for 7 cents-- 7 cents--after all the deductions were taken out. Another cannot pay her car insurance, and she is not getting paid, and she needs to drive her car to work. I have another Federal employee who is deaf, cannot pay her rent, and they are not accepting the fact that she is furloughed. These are real stories about real people. And why are they not getting paid? They are not getting paid because some refuse to pass a continuing resolution until we pass a balanced budget. Sure, we want to pass a balanced budget, but we also need not destroy civil service. And while the civil servants are on the job, the Federal contractors are also losing their wages. Who are they? They are people like the cafeteria workers at NASA who work at the minimum wage. They work for a contractor. They are never going to get caught up. They are the small businesspeople who, again, are Federal contractors and are not being paid. There are people like the small business lady who has a small photography shop outside of the Baltimore passport office.”