Melvin Watt

I thought surely this must be a mistake. I thought the Ten Commandments were to be supported or not supported in a religious context, not in the Halls of the Congress of the United States. Imagine my surprise this morning when I pulled out…

I start kind of like the author of the cartoon, Curtis, with the understanding that you really cannot do justice to practice Black History Month in either 3 minutes or a month. The contributions that black people have made to this country…

It took a tremendous amount of guts and determination for these four students to stand up and confront a system. The need for us to continue to confront issues head on, without fear of intimidation or being called down by our colleagues…

my colleagues, I wanted to first express my thanks to Congressman Jessie Jackson, Jr., for coming up with the idea and pulling the people together to pay tribute to my good friend Cleo Fields. I want to thank my colleague, Major Owens from…

Mr. Speaker, this bill overturns the 1995 Supreme Court case of United States versus Hubbard in which the Supreme Court overturned 40 years of case law to hold that section 1001 of title 18 of the United States Code does not allow…

the question I want to ask of the gentleman is if we are sending a message, has the message worked on crack cocaine? You have not deterred a thing with the failed policies of building more prisons, and so all we are doing now is spending…

I just want to submit to the Speaker that this debate is about yielding unprecedented authority to the Speaker of the House. The Speaker's integrity, the person to whom we are proposing to yield that authority, his integrity is at the…

My colleagues, I want to get back to what this debate is about. It is about whether we give unprecedented authority to the Speaker to bring up any legislation at any time with no advance notice, what we call in the vernacular, martial law…

I rise in support of sustaining the veto of the President on this bill. Mr. Speaker there is a tendency on the part of some of my colleagues to try to divide folks into groups, based on their vote on this issue, of whether they support…

I worshiped on Sunday in the church that burned in Charlotte, NC, and I want to lift up two quick messages from the minister's speech that day. He said unequivocally to the people who are doing these burnings, ``You can destroy the…

I want to go back to this point about whether this is, in fact, a minimum wage bill or is it a doing away with the minimum wage bill? Because at the end of the day all of my colleagues need to understand this: There are 75 percent of the…

today we are going to see the rest of the story, the rest of this extreme agenda that the Republican leadership has been playing out all this term of Congress. We have seen it in Medicare, we have seen it in an erosion of occupational…

Mr. Speaker, the truth of the matter is that resolutions of this kind tend to have no substantive value, so quite often I just ignore them and keep going. But this time, this resolution was introduced by my good friend from New York [Mr…

with all respect to my friend, the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Hayworth], I think he is still giving his campaign speech from 2 years ago. Every budget that is coming to this floor will balance the Federal budget, so this is not about…

the gentleman is focusing on what I struck out of the bill, but he needs to focus on what I put back in the bill, because I put a lot of his very language back in the bill. We are encouraging the obtaining of this goal by encouragement of…

it simply says our Nation should promote the goal of providing decent and affordable housing for all citizens through the efforts and encouragement of Federal, State, and local governments, and by promoting and protecting the independent…

I want to try to frame what this debate is about through the process of this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I was interested in the characterization that the chairman of the subcommittee, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Lazio], made about this…

Because this amendment acknowledges everything the gentleman has said. I do not understand why he is fighting this amendment. This amendment should have been in the manager's amendment. Surely you are not saying that setting a goal of…

basically what we have done in the bill is to acknowledge, as the original bill does, that the Federal Government cannot alone accomplish all of the housing objectives that we all have as a Nation. We have added to that the goal, the…

Mr. Chairman, we are simply trying to make it clear that when a local housing authority submits its housing plan, that the Secretary has the authority to review it in compliance with Federal law, as well as the underlying provisions of…

I just want to make it absolutely clear that the statement of purpose, the goals for which I am substituting in this amendment contemplate partnerships, public and private. It contemplates everything that the gentleman from New York has…

There is a major inconsistency between my amendment and what is in the bill. I just want to make people aware of that. The bill says the Federal Government cannot through its action provide for the housing of every American citizen or even…

I want the gentleman to explain to me, if this is the kind of housing that we have with a goal of providing decent and affordable housing, what kind of housing does the gentleman think we will have if we have no goal, and we do not even…

I want to point out two or three different concerns that we have with the bill. First of all, Mr. Chairman, I think the bill is unnecessary. There are underlying statutes which already provide severe penalties for witness or jury tampering…

Mr. Chairman, I wish I could do imitations because if I could, I would imitate former President Reagan when he said, ``Here we go again.'' Because we are on this slippery slope and we cannot get off. We keep adding things that make no…