Political Quotes

“I come in support of this resolution because of a very meaningful time that I spent as a judge in Tennessee. I spent 7 and a half years as a criminal court judge before coming to Congress, trying the felony criminal cases, the most serious cases. I've never forgotten that the first day I was a judge, Gary Tullock, the chief probation counselor for 16 counties in east Tennessee, told me that 98 percent of the defendants in felony cases came from what he referred to as broken homes. He was not exactly right on that. It was not quite 98 percent, but it was well over 90 percent that came from father-absent households, and that's the key. I went through over 10,000 cases in the time that I was judge because 97 or 98 percent of the people in felony cases in criminal court plead guilty and then apply for probation, and I would get 8- or 10- or 12- page reports into their family and work background and so forth. And every day for 7 and a half years, I would read, Defendant's father left home when defendant was 2 and never returned; defendant's father left home to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back. When you read that thousands of times over several years, it really makes an impression.”