Political Quotes

“Madam President, I want to just say that I respect and am grateful for the generosity of the chairman, the Senator from Oregon, for allowing me to slip in and say some remarks. I want to thank Senator Van Hollen for his incredible leadership on this issue. I have the distinction of being the only one of the 100 Senators who was actually born in Washington, DC. This is the city my parents met in. This is the city they married in. My mom worked for the DC Public Schools. My father was one of the first Black salesmen hired in the entire DC region by the company IBM. I owe this city so much, and I am disappointed that there is nobody in this body who was officially elected to speak for this city. Washington, DC, is suffering, as it has, from a violation of one of our most sacrosanct principles of the country, which is this idea that this democracy is rooted in the ideal of representative democracy, the separation of powers, and most certainly the idea that you can't have taxation without representation. In fact, DC residents pay more per capita in Federal taxes than any other State, but yet they have no say in the Federal Government. Madam President, 700,000 Americans, in one of the only expressions of representative democracy available to them, have 13 council people who were part of a process.…”