Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I have come to the floor to take head-on this notion that transportation and infrastructure money in today's America is pork. This is displaced rhetoric from prior decades before our infrastructure declined dangerously. There are two ingredients that make the United States a world class power. One is human capital. The other is our infrastructure. We cannot maintain our place in the world if we continue to allow our infrastructure to rot. Go to India. Enormous investment in human capital, but not in infrastructure, and so they are exporting their human capital, sending their people, their technicians and their scientists, around the world. A great power must have balanced investment. I am still a tenured law professor at Georgetown. Human capital advantage, I understand. That is why I support education so strongly. But neither must we lose the huge advantage infrastructure gives us in world markets. Instead of maintaining that advantage, we have been disinvesting in our infrastructure. There is no excuse for continuing to do so, because this bill is fully paid for out of transportation trust funds. Nor are the earmarked projects pork. Each and every one of mine came from my transportation department, prioritized for vital projects for the economy of my city.”