Political Quotes

“I just find it confounding that last week we were bouncing all over 98, almost 100 one day, and not a word spoken in here about energy. It wasn't a priority. It was not even a discussion on this floor, except for a few of us, in 5-minute speeches or hour speeches, like tonight, talking about it. But the committee is not meeting. The conference committee is not meeting. And I guess the question is how difficult does it have to get. Because here we are approaching the winter season. People have to heat their homes. And 58 percent of them use gas, I think 30 percent use electricity, and 9 percent use home heating oil, and then there are a few other mixtures in there. But nobody seems to be concerned. I was a retailer for many years, supermarket operator, and I remember back in the 1970s and 1980s when we had the energy spikes that were really severe back then. And as a person in the food industry, you would think people would always have money for food. 1979 and 1980 were very difficult years in my business because people didn't have money to spend.”