Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, first of all, I want to thank the ranking member, who will be the chairman of Government Oversight. I want to thank him and his staff, because we did work on this together. It went over to the Senate. We were trying to move it over here as quickly as possible. The Senators did make some changes, but the biggest change, I believe, was to reduce the cost. Because, you recall, it was an authorization of $150 million, got cut in half to $75 million, which means that the agencies will be absorbing this cost, so it won't cost any appropriations, number one. Number two, I believe one of the major amendments was Senator Coburn from Oklahoma, who basically put the teeth on requiring Congress and OMB to take action if an agency or a program doesn't meet those performance goals. So, again, I respectfully disagree with you on that. But I believe the amendments that Senator Coburn added are actually good, because it does add the teeth or the mechanism to enforce if an agency doesn't do its job by meeting those goals. I do want to thank again the ranking member and the chairman, also, and the staff on both sides, the Republican staff and our side. We worked on this bill, because this is a bill that Mr. Issa and I believe strongly in, and Todd Platts, also. So I want to say thank you for the work that we are doing. And hopefully we can work on other items. If not, we will be working together on this bill again.…”