Charles Taylor: “Allow me to compliment and put in perspective what these freshman Members of Congress, and we have two with us tonight…”

“Allow me to compliment and put in perspective what these freshman Members of Congress, and we have two with us tonight, have done. And not only the freshmen but the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston], a Member of the 103d Congress. In the 102d Congress when I came in, we had a Congress that had been controlled for almost 50 years at that time by one party. We had a situation where in the House bank, Members were writing checks freely. They were not paying the money back. They were laundering money and selling drugs from the post office, which is not a U.S. post office. We are not making these things up. There have been numerous convictions and investigations to prove this to be true. That party from this side that had controlled the House for so long could have reformed it. They did not. Seven of us, became known as the Gang of Seven, started unraveling the twine with a request for an investigation. We finally after 8 months forced an investigation because the people of this country demanded it and we started with the investigation into the House bank, which followed in the post office and made the changes. Even after all of that became known, we could not make the changes in Congress that needed to be made until this 104th Congress and our majority with our freshman class came on board. And now during the last 18 months for the first time in the history of the country, we have had an audit, an audit that has disclosed discrepancies in the past in the House.”