Political Quotes

“Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, we have passed four major pieces of legislation. They weren't partisan pieces of legislation. They weren't rushed through by Democrats and, in fact, a Republican President had to sign all four of those bills. The first one, an $8.3 billion bill, four times what the President asked for, but ultimately, he said, yes, we need that much, and that was way, way, way too little. But we thought it was a huge sum of money at that point in time. It passed 415-2. On March 14, we passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, 363-40. On March 27, just a few days--this is all within weeks of one another, we passed the CARES Act, about $2 trillion, voice vote, $2 trillion, about the same amount as this bill suggests. Frankly, since that time, we have had hundreds of thousands of Americans die from COVID, and our economy go up and down, but now it is tanking, and we are all concerned about that. George Bush came to the House when I was majority leader the first time and said, we need $700 billion, actually, a little more than that, $700 billion to loan to big banks. Loan to big banks? And Ben Bernanke, then the chair of the Federal Reserve said, if you don't do it, we are going to go into a depression. So what happened, Mr. Speaker, was Democrats carried that bill for George Bush, a Republican President, and Republicans gave him one-third of their votes, their President--he was our President, but theirs in the sense he was a Republican.…”