Political Quotes

“This is the tale of two cities--not the tale about the cities, but about two examples of America's great embarrassment and failure to treat a brain disease called mental illness, especially serious mental illness. It is also a tale of Congress' repeated failure to address this. Despite the cries of millions of Americans to do something about it, what we here in Washington tend to do when we hear of another tragedy that has occurred somewhere in the Nation, the tragedies we know by the names of Sandy Hook Elementary School, or Columbine, or Aurora, Colorado, or Tucson, or Santa Barbara, what Washington tends to do is we have a moment of silence. But the people want and Members of Congress want moments of action, not moments of silence. Let me elaborate on this tale. In this building, the U.S. Capitol, back in the 1990s, two police officers were killed when Russell Weston came into the Capitol seeking a red crystal and ended up shooting these police officers. Under his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, he was pushed, with his delusions and hallucinations, to take action. It ended up in tragedy. There was also recently, over the break, another man, Larry Russell Dawson, who has been seen around this Capitol and has once, allegedly, disrupted proceedings in this Chamber and, allegedly, also suffers from some level of mental illness. When he was entering the Capitol Visitor Center, a pistol was seen going through the x-ray.…”