Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, this is a disturbing proposal for the following reasons: We are first of all dealing with pretrial and we are requiring cash bail. What if the person does not have cash? What if the person does not have any previous convictions? It is not clear to me at all why we need to be micromanaging into the 50 States in the Union to determine how they ought to have bail requirements in each State, and it is because of that that I do not have any sympathy for creating new micromanaged requirements that would take 15 percent out of the prison construction to allow for jail construction if in fact we merely tighten up the bail requirement by requiring cash at the beginning when guilt or innocence has not yet been proven. So I am disturbed about this amendment, and since it has not been passed through the Justice Department, they have given us no indication that they would be supportive of it, and I do not remember it coming up in the committee during the discussion of the crime bill, I am very unexcited about here, with a dozen Members on the floor, we are now going to create another micromanagement position for the States. And I thoroughly think that we should be getting kind of full of telling States of how to manage their criminal justice system.”