Political Quotes

“I strongly, respectfully disagree with the characterization my distinguished colleague from California has made suggesting that this somehow represents an 80- percent cut in the transportation funding. That simply is not true. The idea here is to transfer both the revenue collection authority and the spending authority back to where most of it belongs, which is at the State and the local level. There isn't a State in the Union that wants to do away with transportation infrastructure spending. Quite to the contrary, our States and localities and those who assist the contractors, who provide the services, provide the gravel and other materials that go into these roads and bridges and transit projects--they want to get to work, but they want to put this money into steel and concrete in the ground rather than spending so much of it on lobbying, rather than spending so much of it on things that have nothing to do with steel and concrete in the ground. I also wish to refer to something my colleague said with regard to the fact that it costs money to maintain the Interstate Highway System. I absolutely agree--I could not agree more--which is exactly why I wrote this amendment so as to retain a 3.7-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax that would be collected and spent better to make sure we would maintain the Interstate Highway System. That is exactly what we do. A reference was made to my distinguished colleague from Oklahoma, Mr.…”