Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma for his leadership and for his passion. This is one of those areas, quite frankly, as we look at unfunded mandates, that is taking the power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to the elected officials in our States, our county governments, and our cities. The gentleman from Virginia, from the other side, earlier said that certainly he supported this when he was a local official elected there in Virginia, and rightly so. Because I can share a personal story, Mr. Chairman, from a senator, Jim Davis, from my home State who was a county commissioner and now a State senator. I asked him, why do you have such a hard time balancing the budget here in the State? And he gave me two words: unfunded mandates. Why is that? Because we continue to pass regulation after regulation after regulation, send them down to the States and ask the States to deal with them. The States say, well, we don't have money to implement this. They send it even further, to the county governments. So what happens is that property taxes go up at the local level, State income taxes go up there, all because we believe that we know what is best here in Washington, D.C., on how to implement rules and regulations. Mr. Chairman, I would suggest that during the first term of the Obama administration we saw a 10 percent increase in regulatory budgets.…”