Political Quotes

“I applaud the gentlewoman for her very important motion to instruct. It is a motion to instruct that is designed to prevent an ideological experiment being conducted on some of the most vulnerable people in our society. It is about what has gone wrong in Texas, but it is much more than that because we are about to have a very bad precedent established that will spread across this country affecting the old, the poor, the hungry, the victims of Katrina, and the victims who are left behind. As all the Nation saw in the disaster that was the Federal response to Katrina, a hurricane is not the only time that working poor people in this country get left behind. The Texas experiment on poor people suggests that the answer to food security that food stamps provide is to close one out of every four offices that people go to to assess their food stamp needs, to fire a significant number of public employees who have expertise in this area, and to suggest to old and poor and hungry people that what they need to do instead of turning to a public servant is to log on the Internet. Yes, that is actually what the State of Texas is suggesting. And they offer to these poor people, not all of whom are literate in English or Spanish much less literate in the language of e-commerce, they offer them an alternative, which is the one that so many American families have faced, to dial in and be put on hold, much as the victims of Katrina were put on hold.…”