Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague for yielding. I thank my colleague from Kansas for his excellent support and work on this bill, as well. People often ask me when I go home to western Pennsylvania whether we ever knock off all the fighting down here and do some actual work and work across the aisle between Congress and the White House to actually get things done. What you are seeing here in this Chamber today is an example of the fact that there are many of us down here who are very serious about making that happen and making it happen more often as we go forward. The FREED Act responded to a very specific set of circumstances, which is that it has long been true that, if you are a 100 percent disabled veteran, you have your Federal student loans forgiven. But we all know there is a big difference between putting something down on paper and making it happen in real life, and we were seeing huge numbers of disabled veterans not take advantage of this program either because they didn't know about it or because the process of applying for it was just too burdensome, there was too much paperwork, or it took too long. If you have a 100 percent disability rating, there is a lot in your life you have to worry about besides doing paperwork; so Congressman Watkins, Congressman Fitzpatrick and another great western Pennsylvanian, Congressman Guy Reschenthaler, and I were all looking at the same set of facts and said: We know what we need to do here.…”