Political Quotes

“I appreciate Mr. Garamendi's leadership on this issue. I don't think there is--I have not been able to find--another democratic nation in our world that shuts down its government over policy arguments, wasting $1.2 billion of GDP a week for no purpose. Madam Speaker, I want to share a few stories of the impact of this senseless shutdown on workers, on people in my home State. When we went home on Friday, I organized a meeting at our airport, Detroit Metropolitan Airport, with a range of Federal workers who have been affected. We just wanted to listen to them and hear their stories. We invited Fred Upton and my Democratic colleagues from Michigan, and those who traveled home were able to make it. I just want to share a few of those stories. There is Dave, a biologist at the NOAA research lab in Ann Arbor. He has been furloughed, not getting paid. They study the water currents in the Straits of Mackinac. Line 5, our locally famous pipeline that literally just goes in the water in the bottom of the Great Lakes underneath the Mackinac Bridge, if that breaks or has a rupture, the research of this group is what determines how we would fight that oil spill, which would devastate the economy of the Great Lakes. That supercomputer is shut off. It is just not working. And if we have that, if there was an accident there, the whole Midwest would be out of luck.…”