Elijah Cummings: “Mr. Speaker, tonight it is a very sad time when we consider a program, as the gentlewoman from California said, that has…”

“Mr. Speaker, tonight it is a very sad time when we consider a program, as the gentlewoman from California said, that has been so successful; and it is a sad time when a program that has touched so many lives and built so many lives so successfully is being attacked. One of the things that the gentlewoman from California talked about was she went to the Committee on Rules and she asked a question, why is it that the Republican leadership is so afraid of amendments to this bill to make it a better bill and to make the Head Start program better? Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ``You cannot lead where you do not go and you cannot teach what you don't know.'' The fact is that there are so many children like the 4-year-old that I saw just a month ago graduating from our Head Start program at the Union Baptist Church in my district reading on the level of a third or fourth grader. That is what Head Start is all about.”