Political Quotes

“I bring forward an amendment this afternoon to talk about my concern with the process we are going through. We started out with a request for $92.2 billion in emergency spending--$20 billion for hurricane recovery, $72 billion for the war on terror. Then we added $14 billion of additional nonemergency spending. Our constituents simply can't run their households or businesses like this, and I think we should not be running our business here, for the country, in that way either. The money we spend here does not come out of thin air. Of course, it comes out of the pockets of hard-working Americans. We should not take the emergency spending process lightly. By definition, these are dollars we have not budgeted, and they should be reserved only for the urgent and dire need for which they were intended. There are some examples, very briefly, of nonemergency items. There are a number of them. Regardless of their merit, and they probably have merit, the question is, Do they belong in this bill? Why are we using this bill to provide $230 million for an Osprey program which is not involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan? We also just enacted a $286 billion highway bill less than a year ago. Yet this bill will add an additional $594 million in additional highway spending that really has nothing to do with any emergency. Why is there an emergency to spend $700 million to move a railroad that, while damaged by Katrina, has already been repaired? It may be a useful thing.…”