Political Quotes

“Periodically, we get 1,000-page bills or 2,000-page bills or 4,000- page bills that we debate on this floor. It can be a little hard for the people in the gallery and the people at home to make sense of what we are doing. This bill is not that. This excellent piece of legislation from Mrs. Chavez-DeRemer fits on a single piece of paper. She and I were talking about that, Mr. Speaker, before we began debate on this bill, about how much good wisdom is packed into a single page. We will probably talk about the merits of this legislation for longer than it would take us to read the entirety of the bill, but it is just that good. The Impact of Crime on Public Building Usage Act of 2023, which is this piece of paper, Mr. Speaker, H.R. 6261, directs the Government Accountability Office, or the GAO, to examine how crime in and around public buildings affects building usage, how it affects how workers might commute to the office, and how it might impose any additional costs to maintain those public buildings. In 2020, Mr. Speaker, we saw crime rates spike across the country. In many of the downtown areas in many of our States, areas that used to be bustling with workers became near ghost towns that changed the crime profile in many of those areas, to be sure. We are in a little bit different era today, and now we have differing, conflicting data community by community. In some, crime rates are continuing to go up.…”