Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, when the Republican Majority Leader was campaigning in Texas, he declared Social Security, "a bad retirement program," "a rotten trick on the American people", and said, "I think we are going to have to bite the bullet on Social Security and phase it out." Of course all of us remember Speaker Gingrich's prophetic remarks that we should let Medicare "wither on the vine." So it is that, every time people that are predisposed against Social Security are caught meddling with it, they come up with a gimmick like this resolution. Now, this year in Congress, the most amazing thing has been that we have been in an emergency state all year long. Every time that there has been a need to reach into Social Security, an emergency is declared. That is what happened in April when the price of getting the necessary funding for Kosovo was to attach billions of dollars of unrelated projects. That is what happened when the Republicans discovered the census that we have taken every 10 years since 1790 and declared we needed $4 billion to fund that. Now, I understand the Republicans have discovered it gets cold in the winter and hot in the summer, so they declared the Fuel Assistance Program an emergency. These folks have almost as many emergencies as EMS--all of them to reach into Social Security. Of course we would have had a true emergency had President Clinton not vetoed their tax bill.”