Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Nothing in this bill interferes with antitrust settlement. Nothing. The bill goes to Congress' constitutional power. That is why every Member of Congress should oppose this motion to recommit. I say this because it targets legislation designed exclusively to strengthen Congress. Serious people on both sides of the aisle understand the importance of Congress' spending power. A major theme of the Speaker's A Better Way Initiative is that the spending power is one of Congress' most effective tools in reining in executive overreach. Liberal legal scholar Abner Mikva agrees: To ensure that Congress would act as the first branch of government, the constitutional Framers gave the legislature virtually exclusive power to control the Nation's purse strings. They knew that the power of the purse was the most far-reaching and effectual of all governmental powers. This motion stems from a misunderstanding of the governing principle of this bill, which is simply this: DOJ's authority to settle cases requires the ability to obtain redress for actual victims--actual victims. However, once direct victims have been compensated, deciding what to do with additional funds extracted from defendants becomes a policy question properly decided by elected representatives in Congress, not agency bureaucrats or prosecutors. The Framers assigned this job to Congress.…”