Political Quotes

“I want to commend Chairman Porter for the outstanding job he did with this piece of legislation. Make no mistake about it, people on both sides of the aisle here have the same ultimate purpose. We want to help kids. We want to make sure kids have a chance to go to college. We want to help protect our workers. We want to make sure that education is a key priority. We agree on that. My personal experience as someone who went to school on a student loan and could not have gone otherwise, as someone who taught in a public school for 7 years and in an urban depressed school district and as someone who ran a Federal title I program for 3 years, I think I know something about some of the programs we are talking about. There is a key difference, Mr. Chairman, between what the administration wants and what this Congress wants. The difference is that the administration wants to empower the bureaucracy and we want to empower people. It is very simple and very fundamental. We heard in the debate on the other side from our more liberal friends that there is no help for job training, for housing assistance, for energy assistance, for child care, for homeless shelters, for health care for the poor and for housing rehab, to name a few. What they did not say, Mr. Chairman, is that this bill increases the community service block grant by the single largest amount in the program's history since 1981, $100 million, Mr. Chairman.…”