Charles Rangel: “My colleagues, I know that history would reflect that this Presidential election started much earlier than most of them…”

“My colleagues, I know that history would reflect that this Presidential election started much earlier than most of them do. As a matter of fact, it started the very day that President Obama was sworn in. The honesty of this Republican Party was for them to say that the strategy for getting back the White House was to make certain that their primary job was to get rid of Obama. The destruction of the President of the United States and everything he stood for, every piece of legislation, every idea had to be destroyed as their strategy, not for America, but for their party. Well, I assumed that this was just political rhetoric. I didn't put too much importance to it. But when the debt ceiling came, I felt it was just a little Republican ploy of playing chicken to see how much they could get. But when I saw they were prepared to allow the fiscal integrity of the United States of America, and what it represented, to go down the drain just to embarrass the President, then I was nudged to take another look to see just how far would they go. Then comes recently the Attorney General, where we just didn't seem to care what kind of bad history we were making for this great Republic. We were going to, the first time in history, hold him in contempt and turn it over to the Justice Department to see what they could do to the President. Then, of course, comes the tax cut for 98 percent of the American people.…”