Political Quotes

“I thank my friend for yielding. H.R. 5912 is a bipartisan bill to end public financing for political conventions. And that's all it is. I want to begin by thanking my friend, Mr. Loebsack from Iowa. We belong to different parties. I have no doubt we'll be voting for different Presidential candidates. But we both agree that it's wrong to use taxpayer dollars to finance partisan political events. And I appreciate his support in helping push this legislation. Let me make it clear to everybody. I'm not opposed to political party conventions. I've gone to 10 of them. I actually had the privilege of helping stage one in 2000, when I was chief of staff of the Republican National Committee. And I can assure you that experience taught me that the parties are more than capable of putting on their conventions. They essentially do that now. The Federal component of the cost to the convention is about 23 percent of the total cost. So the idea that they can't find the resources to do this for themselves I think simply falls flat on its face. This year, at a time when we're going to be running trillion-dollar deficits for the fourth year in a row, we wrote checks to the Democratic Party and to the Republican Party, as my friend Mr. Lungren mentioned, for almost $18 million each. For what? Was it really necessary? Does anybody really believe that was the best use of public money? Is there no program that's more important?…”