Political Quotes

“My thanks to Chairman Williams and to the ranking member, Ms. Velazquez of New York for their leadership. She and I were having a conversation reminding ourselves that 84 percent of all of the loosening of the guardrails that created the problems occurred while the previous administration was in office. It is important for the facts to be noted in that regard. It is not in an effort to cast aspersions, but it is in an effort to make sure we tell the truth. Mr. Speaker, I rise today like the gentleman from Texas and the gentlewoman from New York in support of H.R. 5427 which prohibits, as you have heard, individuals convicted of defrauding small business pandemic relief programs from receiving future non-disaster financial aid assistance from the administration. It sounds like it is common sense to me. If you put your hand in the cookie jar and you steal the cookies, why should you be rewarded later for that? To this day, our Nation has to reckon with the fact that the consequences of that decision in 2020 to fast-track the allocation of the pandemic relief funds by weakening and removing the internal controls really caused the problems. It was a recipe for disaster. Are we even astonished that something like this would happen? This is why so many of us argued against this in 2020. While many of these antifraud controls are being reinstituted by the Small Business Administration, fraud in these programs has run rampant.…”