Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, the new majority has succeeded in turning a silk purse into a sow's ear, in terms of our crime bill efforts. I would just like to take a few minutes to recall what the contract has been doing to us in the crime area. First of all, we have just said, as of this week, that law enforcement officers can kick the doors down on our houses at any time for any reason without a warrant. Magistrate requirement? Oh, yes; you go to a magistrate afterward to determine if the officer was acting in good faith or not, instead of going before to have it determined by an arbiter in the court. They have also created a system so that a defendant, a criminal defendant, can be executed even though he may have an appeal pending before he ever knows whether the appeal has been disposed of or not. Then the new majority, for partisan reasons, wants to eliminate one of the great features of the 1994 crime bill, namely the promise of 100,000 new community policemen on the beat, and replace it with a wasteful revenue sharing program that harks back to the eighties that has failed miserably. We have had so many horror stories that we understand why eventually the plug was pulled on that old program. Now that the Republican majority has actually done all these things, they are going to provide less money for prisons while trying to pretend that they are going to be providing more.”