Political Quotes

“I appreciate the gentleman's courtesy in permitting me to speak on this bill. Mr. Speaker, there's no small amount of irony that we are having this discussion today. It's on the anniversary of President Eisenhower signing into law the National Defense Highway Act. This weekend will be the 150th anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad Act, signed into law by Abraham Lincoln. There was an era when Republicans believed in infrastructure and development. In fact, for most of our history, actually, infrastructure has not been partisan. It's been something that people on this House floor could come together to work on. There would be differences, to be sure. But for the 20 years that I've been involved with this issue, we've been working to broaden our view of how to make transportation work better, involve citizens, more flexibility, make the dollars stretch. This came crashing to a halt with this Congress. Now the bill that's going to come before us, I will very reluctantly vote in favor of it in part because of what's not in it. Remember, our Republican colleagues tried to force through a bill which, for the first time in history, had never had bipartisan work that came out of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, that came out of Ways and Means. In fact, it never even had a full committee hearing, rush- to-work session. Mercifully, it collapsed before it came to the floor.…”