Betty Sutton: “there are times when the people of this great Nation need and demand things of their government that politics make it…”

“there are times when the people of this great Nation need and demand things of their government that politics make it impossible to accomplish. This has been the case far too often throughout the last 12 years. Through the last election, the people of this Nation have demanded that this government reexamine and change our priorities and our direction. The people have asked us to respond to their hopes and their dreams and their needs. They have asked us to realize that there are good citizens of this Nation, honest people who work hard and play by the rules and who nonetheless struggle and live in poverty and toil in obscurity through no fault of their own. The people have called us to recognize the equality of opportunity, the basis upon which this Nation was founded, the means of equal access to education, equal chances to go to college. The people have demanded that we never squash the hope of science with the politics of partisan personal gain, that we never play games with the opportunity to save lives. They know that the minute that this great Nation stops being a beacon of hope and a champion of forward progress for the world, that we become something less than what we are.…”