Political Quotes

“I want to thank, first of all, you for your very kind remarks, but also for moving this legislation very swiftly through the full committee, along with Eliot Engel's full support, and the chairwoman emeritus, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Thank you for your steadfast support for human rights, now presiding over this session. And, Mr. Chairman, I do want to thank you for being a champion on behalf of the dissidents, the bloggers, the religious dissidents, political and religious in Vietnam, who suffer daily beatings at the hands of an increasingly absurd and worsening dictatorship. Vietnam is in a race to the bottom with some of the dictatorships around the world, including Cuba, including China, Somalia, and other places where people's human rights are systematically trashed by the regimes. I do rise to ask, respectfully, that Members support the Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2013. The purpose of this bipartisan legislation is simple: to send a clear, strong, and compelling message to the increasingly repressive communist regime in power in Vietnam that says that the United States is serious about combating human rights abuse in Vietnam. Underscoring the worsening situation in Vietnam, John Sifton of Human Rights Watch testified at a June 4 hearing that I chaired, and he noted that ``in the first few months of 2013, more people have been convicted in political trials as in the whole of the last year.'' And that has only gotten worse as each week passes in Vietnam.…”