Political Quotes

“as I said yesterday, my heart goes out to those who suffered in the terrible accident of Amtrak's Northeast Regional Train No. 188, on Tuesday night at 9 p.m., when the accident occurred. As we now know, the train was going more than 100 miles an hour on a curve where it should have been going 50 miles an hour. It is very tragic. Seven people died and scores are injured. There were about 250 people on the train. It is unfortunate that sometimes it takes an event such as this before policymakers learn what they need to learn. But worse still would be if policymakers fail to learn anything at all. National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said there is technology available called positive train control that would have prevented this accident. That technology is in place in a few places in the Northeast corridor. This Northeast corridor, millions of people travel there, but it is not yet in place where the accident happened. There are Members of the Republican Senate who have for years denigrated, belittled, and harmed the Amtrak system. I have watched this, and it is really unfair. They attack Amtrak every year, every appropriations process. Many on the far right regularly try to punch the Nation's train system right in the gut. They have made it a punching bag. Yesterday, the House of Representatives approved a bill that underfunds Amtrak by another one-quarter of a billion dollars.…”