Political Quotes

“We have a bill before us that is $64 billion, and I have spent the last week trying to get the OMB and Department of Commerce the background on all of these requests, and what I can tell you is there is an immediate need for about $24 billion that we ought to be passing through this Chamber to take care of immediate needs over the next 2 years in relationship to this tragedy in terms of Sandy. Almost every amendment I am going to offer or hope to offer is about transparency, is about limiting who can have access, such as people who are in arrears on their taxes for years and years. What we learned on the Homeland Security Committee, which has the authorization of most of these programs, which I will become ranking member of, is that out of the $100 billion-plus we spent on Katrina, $11 billion of it got wasted. One of the reasons it got wasted is because we didn't have transparency, we didn't have good-government amendments on it. And we are getting ready to make that mistake again. So I was asked to come down, by our side of the aisle, to have amendments pending, and now that I can't have amendments pending, I think I will just talk in general about this bill for a moment, if I might. There is no one in the Senate who does not want to meet the needs of the people who have suffered from this horrific storm. How we do that is important. Meeting immediate needs in terms of the insurance fund for flooding--that is something on which everybody would agree.…”