Charles Rangel: “my friends and colleagues, it is more difficult to get more partisan than I am as a Democrat. But there comes a time…”

“my friends and colleagues, it is more difficult to get more partisan than I am as a Democrat. But there comes a time when our Nation is facing a serious problem that it just shatters the walls of party labels. I do not know when it happened or where I was when it happened, but somehow the crisis as it relates to drug addiction and the problems that occur when we ignore it, it seems as though somewhere the war has been won or it has gone away, or that certainly no part of the Congress is prepared to deal with it. Oh, we talk about violence, we talk about crime, we talk about our health bill. But if you talk about all of those things, why do you not stop and think why are we having so much crime? Seventy percent of the people in those jails are there because of drug addiction. Why are we having so much hemorrhage in our health bills? Because most of the people that are in these hospitals are in there with gunshot wounds, addiction, children being born addicted to drugs, paying $5,000 to $7,000 a day for each and every one of these cases. Yet when someone comes and says can we help do something about it, and they come to the Congress, you see what we have done. Some of us, Republicans and Democrats, have worked around the clock, working with this administration. And not just this one, whether it was Nixon or whether it was Carter or whether it was Ford or whether it was Reagan, we tried to work together, not as Democrats and not as Republicans.”