Political Quotes

“Madam Chair, I rise in strong opposition to this amendment. I will be brief because I know we have many more amendments to consider, but I want to focus on this one because I think this proposal to cut the Community Development Block Grant program by $396 million is particularly ill-advised, and I suspect Members on both sides of the aisle will understand that and will agree. We are all, after all, hearing from our mayors and from our local communities with great regularity that CDBG is money well spent. First of all, this program has been much better funded in past years. Even with the increase in the current bill, for which we commend the chairman, even with that, the funding is much less than could be utilized. We know the CDBG program has some very strong virtues. One of them is flexibility and community self-determination in terms of how this money is spent, how it is applied, and the kind of leverage that this money represents, for bringing forth participation and funding from other sources. This is a program that has stood the test of time, that has strong bipartisan support in this Chamber and across the country. So I think the notion that we would cut back this appropriation by hundreds of millions of dollars is most unwise, and I urge defeat of the amendment. I yield back the balance of my time.”