Political Quotes

“Before you go off on this construction program, giving us construction money, let me tell you what we are doing here in Minnesota. We do not build schools. We do lease plans. So if you come up with a construction program for charter schools in Washington, D.C., I am telling you right now that here is one State where this only does not work, it flies directly in the face of the strategy that we have put in place for charter schools in our State. So what is going to happen is people from Minnesota are sending money to Washington, and we are not going to be able to get any of it back unless we let you in Washington change our strategy for funding charter schools. We think we have got a pretty good system. We think it makes sense. It is not perfect, but this works for us, and this is what we want to do. Now, all of a sudden, to get our money back, we are going to have to change our program. Well, up until today, we did not even know that Minnesota had that kind of a strategy in place.”