Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady from California. You know, I have been listening to the debate in my office, et cetera, and I agree with my colleague Mel Watt. Sometimes we get confused, I think. Maybe if we can just break this down to the common denominator. I used to be a prosecutor, and I asked the following question: If a burglar breaks into your house and steals your life savings, do you then go to the police department and ask the police department to have the investigator or someone there so you can try to find out who did it or put in measures to prevent it from happening again, because you ask him to look to see how they broke into your house, what they did, how can you fix it? Or do you say, we don't need a police department. Forget having the police department, so that other people's homes can be broken into also. That is really what we are talking about here. So in the aftermath of the largest crisis of our lifetime, a crisis that not only wiped out trillions of dollars worth of investments and savings but led to the exposure of what we talked about, the Ponzi schemes and crimes perpetuated against the American people, it is imperative that we don't handcuff the people who can look and put in preventive measures and make sure that we don't have this catastrophe again. The amount of money that the SEC and the CFTC are requesting, $160 million, is less than we spend a day in petroleum marketplaces, in Baghdad or Kabul.…”