Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I thank my friend and colleague, Congresswoman Tlaib, for her leadership and for bringing this amendment to the floor. I am proud to join her in it. As many of you know, I represent my hometown of Flint, Michigan. Flint is the community that really brought national attention to this issue of lead in drinking water. Fifteen thousand children were impacted in Flint, Michigan, because of lead leaching into their drinking water. Those lead service lines were the source of that contamination. There is no safe level of lead in drinking water. Right now, we have a rule that allows for a certain level of lead. Many communities exceed it, but there is no safe level of lead in drinking water, and we need to do everything we can to eliminate it. This is a big step forward in dealing with it. And let me just remind my friends, yes, of course, this sort of initiative comes with a price tag. But if you really want to know the price of this issue, come to Flint and you will see the price of failure, the price of lead exposure. It is not just measured in the half a billion dollars that it has cost to remediate a problem that could have been solved if this program had been in place before, but the cost is measured in the effect that that lead exposure has had on developing small brains and the effect on the trajectory of the lives of those kids forever.…”