Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Zeldin and Mr. Rose for holding this Special Order hour on the importance of reauthorizing the Victim Compensation Fund and ensuring that every responder and survivor is made whole, as Congress intended. As my colleagues have also discussed, we have been pushing for more than 15 years to finally address the moral obligations we have to those made ill by exposure to toxins on September 11 and in the weeks and months after the attack. It is a two-part moral obligation. First, the attacks on September 11 were not just attacks on New York or on Washington, D.C. They were attacks on America. In the last few weeks, we have heard an objection raised to this bill that New York should handle this issue because it is a ``New York problem.'' The World Trade Center stood in my district. Many of the people who ran into those towers were my fellow New Yorkers. The people who fled their homes and offices to find safety were my constituents. But they were Americans, and those towers fell on that Tuesday morning not because they stood in New York, but because they stood in the United States of America. While it may have been the brave men and women of the Fire Department of New York and the New York Police Department and the Port Authority who first rushed to those towers, to say that the responders and survivors who are sick today are just in New York is factually untrue.…”