Political Quotes

“But to focus on those who are the weakest, those who do not have high powered lobbyists to argue their causes, to me is a bit much for us to be doing, and so I want to congratulate the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Fields] for bringing us here this evening to talk about this rescission package because in the next day or two, we are going to begin to focus. Now, I have had a lot of visitors in my office in the last few days. I would be there at 7:30, I will be having breakfast with people from the technical education people in my community, vocation educational people are all here, wanting us to really be sensible about some of these cuts. But I want to mention one last area because I think it is so important, and that is the area of literacy. The interesting thing, there are three significant literacy programs that these rescissions will just terminate; not cut back so that we will serve fewer people. They are terminated altogether. The workplace literacy partnerships, terminated. The literacy program for homeless adults, terminated. The literacy program for prisoners, terminated. Here we are building more prisons, and what we seem to be focused on is a warehousing of prisoners. It would seem to me that we ought to be looking at ways to rehabilitate people, and the best way I know to rehabilitate many of the people who find their ways into our prison systems is to teach them to read and write.”