Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, first of all, I want to thank the ranking member, Mr. Price, for the leadership that he has provided in this committee, and also, thank you to his staff. I also want to thank my friend Chairman Mario Diaz-Balart for his leadership in working on this bill in a bipartisan way. There are a couple things I just want to point out that are important to the State of Texas. First of all, one of the issues that we worked on together was to make sure that we direct the Federal highway authority to continue to develop a freight network that connects to our high-volume land ports of entry. Some of the maps that I have seen show that they don't connect to the land ports; but just to give you an idea, in my hometown of Laredo, the largest inland port, if you look at the trucks that come in, those are 12,000 trailers every single day. This is why this particular language got added: to make sure that the freight is connected to land ports of entry and will make sure that American communities are able to get products that are coming into the United States. The other thing I do want to emphasize that was put in in this particular bill has to do with encouraging the standardization of passenger rail standards between the U.S. and Mexico, which means basically from the San Antonio area to the Laredo area to the Monterrey area, and this is something that will be one of the first. I want to thank the chairman and the ranking member for putting in that language.…”