Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. In ``Leaves of Grass,'' Walt Whitman wrote that ``the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.'' So each of our States is like a stanza, a line in the remarkable and always unfinished American poem, a lyrical whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Four years ago, the more than 700,000 of our countrymen and women living in Washington, D.C. exercised their rights and their powers under the Ninth Amendment and the Tenth Amendment to vote to form a new State and to petition us for admission to the Union. That vote carried by a 6-1 margin. Washingtonians ask us today to pierce the sound barrier of propaganda in 2020 to hear once again, and to recall in our hearts, the poetry that is America. We began as 13 States, but Congress has exercised our powers under Article IV, Section 3, 37 different times, to admit 37 new States, all of them by simple legislative acts, none of them by constitutional amendment. Each one was controversial in its own way: They said Texas couldn't be admitted because it was a separate republic; West Virginia used to be part of Virginia; Utah was too Mormon; New Mexico was too Catholic; and, of course, everyone knew it was unconstitutional to admit Hawaii and Alaska in 1959 because they weren't contiguous. Washingtonians do not ask us to convert the Federal district into a State.…”