Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from Texas because I wanted to respond to my friend from Massachusetts, who didn't have any more time to yield or talk about it after he talked about people in my district on food stamps. Indeed they are, and they don't want to be. If you'd support our legislation that's bipartisan on healthy forests, they'd have dignity and a job, and they'd be able to take care of their families, and they would have schools. I know they have dignity when they're on food stamps. I understand that. I also know they'd feel much better about their role in life if they could go and be productive again as they were. We've seen 300 mills closed, 30,000 people lose their jobs, and there's a solution here that doesn't raid the Federal Treasury and borrow money to pay for it. It's called a job. And we wouldn't spend over half the Forest Service budget fighting fire. Instead, we would replenish our forests, we'd get them healthy again, we wouldn't choke our valleys with smoke in the summer, which is occurring all over the country, because we'd be managing these great Federal forest reserves. Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, let me just suggest to my Republican colleagues that maybe they ought to deal with sequester, maybe they ought to stop threatening to shut the government down, and maybe they ought to bring the President's jobs bill to the floor to put people back to work, and, in the meantime, they ought not to throw poor people off food assistance.…”