Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. First of all, let me say two things: We are confronting, in my view, an unprecedented refusal of an administration to cooperate with the Congress in the exercise of its constitutional duties. I refer specifically to the issuance of subpoenas, either for testimony or for documentary evidence, so the Congress can properly exercise its oversight responsibilities under the Constitution. I have been here for some almost four decades, and I have never seen any administration, essentially, direct across the board no response to the Congress of the United States or to its committees. So, yes, we are pursuing. The gentleman referred to the contempt citation dealing with Mr. Barr and Mr. Ross. Now, the issue at the center of that, as the gentleman knows, is the administration ultimately decided it would not pursue the policies that were the subject of that investigation. However, it is not about the specific, but it is about the general constitutional responsibility that this Congress has to the American people. We ask for information not on behalf of ourselves individually, but on behalf of the American people, so they will know what their government is doing, there will be a transparency to the operations of government, and they will be able to determine whether or not any administrative official, or the administration generally, is acting on its behalf personally or whether it is acting on behalf of the American people.…”