Political Quotes

“160-or-so years ago, Congress passed a rule prohibiting Members of Congress from debating the issue of slavery. The issue of slavery, the greatest blemish on our Nation's history, was actually not debated in Congress for many years because conservative leaders of this body simply said it could not be, and passed a rule prohibiting it. John Quincy Adams, former President and later Member of Congress in the 1830s and 1840s came to this Chamber of the House of Representatives and collected letters from his constituents. He called them petitions from mostly women's group in Massachusetts. Women in those days were not allowed to voted, as most of us know. He brought these petitions from women who were opposed to slavery and read them on the House floor. While the rules said he could not debate slavery, he was simply a mouthpiece, a conduit, was a megaphone for the concerns of the people in his district about a great national problem. Fast forward the clock to 2003. We now have a legislative leadership which is again saying no to debating issues of what really happened with the Bush administration's distortion of evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.”