Political Quotes

“I rise this morning to urge--indeed, to plead--with my colleagues to cosponsor bipartisan legislation that Representative Kinzinger and I will be introducing this afternoon, which would authorize 1,000 additional special immigrant visas to allow the United States to bring our Afghan allies to safety here in America. Earlier this week, Senators McCain and Shaheen introduced identical legislation in the other body. The need for this bill is urgent. Indeed, Congress should have acted yesterday. That is because the State Department has confirmed now that they have completely run out of the visas we authorized in December. In a way, that is good news. Remember how in previous years the State and other agencies never remotely came close to using the visas that were authorized, which consigned these poor souls to the seventh circle of bureaucratic hell. Processing was so slow and abysmal that only 32 of our Afghan allies received a visa in 2012. People were left in limbo--or worse--while the Taliban hunted them down, kidnapped their siblings, murdered their parents--capturing them, torturing, beheading them. But the administration responded to the demand from Congress for significant reform in the program, and the agency has aggressively attacked the visa-eligible backlog. Despite the processing--on average, 400 visas each month since January--years of a failed system means that, today, there remains an astonishing 6,340 brave men and women waiting in limbo.…”