Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from Oklahoma. Madam President, I rise in opposition to the amendment. I appreciate the concerns raised by the Senator, but I rise in strong opposition to block granting and cutting the food assistance program called SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, for our country. I have always viewed, as chair of the Agriculture Committee, two programs very similarly. The first is crop insurance, which is there when there is a disaster for a farmer. The second one is SNAP or the Supplemental Food Assistance Program, which is there when there is a disaster for a family. They both go up when the disasters go up, and they go down when things get better. So when we have droughts, when we have what has been happening to our farmers over the last year and before, we see costs go up for crop insurance. We don't cap that arbitrarily saying, We don't like these droughts, we don't like these breezes, we don't like all this stuff, so even though it is real important to the farmers, we are going to cap how much we will help them. The crop insurance is there. The same thing is true for a family. It wasn't that long ago--in fact, the beginning of 2009--when we in Michigan had the highest unemployment rate in the country. I believe it hit 15.7 percent unemployment at that time.…”