Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, you have heard the mention of bipartisan work and bipartisan support on these issues, and Chairman Walden is exactly right. Not only have Members worked in a bipartisan way, but also our staffs have to answer the questions: How do we help to get the resources to our local and our State officials? How do we help to remove barriers so we can end this epidemic in our country? Last year, 63,632 Americans lost their lives to drug abuse and drug overdose, and 1,600 of those were Tennesseans. We can all tell you these stories, and I tell you as a mom and as a friend, so many times when you talk to families and talk to people who have been so affected and so impacted by this, they talk about family members and coworkers and individuals that they are in contact with every single day and how we need to work on this issue with opioids, with fentanyl, with heroin, with cocaine, these illicit drugs that are flooding our streets, as well as the pills. Now, last October, during a hearing when Dr. Gottlieb was before us and we were conducting oversight with the FDA, one of the things that he mentioned was there were some changes that they needed to see in Federal law. The number one change they needed was permission to work some changes in Federal statute for how they would work in these international mail facilities. As we have said, there are hundreds of millions of packages.…”