Political Quotes

“Madam President, at this moment in my home State of Oregon 500,000 acres are ablaze. Sometimes it is hard to get your hands around numbers, particularly large numbers, so I will give a sense of this. If you were to add up all of the fires in Oregon and if they were in one place, it would cover an area roughly 20 miles by 40 miles. That is an enormous section of a State to be aflame. Because there are so many devastating fires at once, crews are coming from all over to help with all kinds of aircraft and all kinds of hotshot crews. They are doing all they can, but it is not just Oregon that has fires; other States have fires too. There are over 250,000 acres ablaze in Washington State to the north in a single fire. I believe it is the largest single fire in Washington State's history. As a result of fires in Oregon and fires in Washington and other fires, we are draining our fire funds at an expansive rate, and thus we have a big problem: We are running out of funds to pay for fighting these fires. Tonight we had before our Chamber an emergency supplemental bill to provide 615 million more dollars to fight fires this season across the United States of America. A procedural tactic was used to kill this bill. Quite frankly, that is enormously shortsighted.…”