Political Quotes

“I yield myself such time as I may consume. I appreciate the thoughts from my good friend from North Carolina, but I have to disagree with her. First, I want to remind her that we are here today to debate and talk about the rule for the National Estuary Program, and as someone from North Carolina who also represents a lot of coastal communities, I am sure that your fishermen and your tourism industry depend just as much on clean water and healthy estuaries as we do in the State of Maine. And I don't want to underestimate the importance to jobs, to job growth and to a healthy economy that the estuary program has in a coastal State. I also want to say that this merely increases the authorization for the funding. This isn't spending the money today, and decisions can be made down the line. But important decisions do need to be made to protect more estuaries in our country to make sure that these vibrant areas that produce much of our fishing stock and are critical to our tourism industry continue to thrive and are vibrant. Estuary counties only make up 13 percent of the Nation's land area but account for 49 percent of the GDP and support 28 million jobs. So if you want to talk about jobs and you're from a coastal State and you're going to neglect taking care of our estuaries, I think you need to go home and talk to the people of those coastal districts, commercial fishermen, people who depend on the tourism industry and know what a critical bill we're talking about today.…”