Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Again, we are not going to find a lot of disagreement. I will tell you what a good first step would be: hire some surgeons. There are openings there. This is our first salvo at trying to fix the VA. We have an appeals bill that every single veterans service organization agrees: appeals modernization. We have worked that thing through. We have had the language. It is not here. We have a Choice bill that is expiring August 7. We have had a hearing with the VA Secretary, and that is the way it should have been. It is not here today. What we have is a bill that did not go through regular order, a bill that obviously didn't build a consensus, and this is very unusual to have a bill from the VA Committee. I bet you 90 to 95 percent of the time when one hits this floor, it gets 300 to 400 votes up on that board, but this one is not. So, again, if the contention is that Members of this House don't care if there is a bad employee working there, that is disingenuous and wrong. But if we do believe, putting it in place--and again, the example I gave, the chairman is right. It took Robert 6 weeks to get all of the information gathered together because the manager who left was holding on to it and had to get the union to force the release of that information. His 14 days would have come and gone, and that is it. This is why, sometimes, I am not going to defend 400 days. That is ridiculous.…”