Political Quotes

“I would like to continue exactly the themes my colleague from Vermont brought up, except I think, before we talk about artificial intelligence, we should talk about natural intelligence. It absolutely goes against natural intelligence for us to sit here in this Chamber knowing that we have 260,000 working American families, who work for our government, who are doing their job and not getting paid. That, to me, is the crisis we should be talking about. And, yes, I agree with my colleague from Vermont. We should not be worried about Mr. Musk or any of the other billionaires going hungry. I worry about our TSA agents going hungry. I worry about our Coast Guard people going hungry. I worry about the people at FEMA going hungry. And yet, with total disregard for over a quarter of a million families, we sit in this Chamber, and we are getting paid. Everybody here is getting paid, and yet they are not. And I applaud my colleague from Vermont, who is walking out of the floor, for caring about working Americans. Why don't we care about them? Why don't we fund DHS now? Why don't we worry about those families who, by the way, according to the last Secretary of Homeland Security--the last one said--and I am going to quote here: The average [TSA agent] lives paycheck-to-paycheck. We have taken away three paychecks. Three paychecks we have taken away from them. If there was ever a time we needed to fund [DHS], it's . . . now. This is not a Republican Secretary saying that.”