Political Quotes

“watching the sun rise over this Capitol each morning is a truly beautiful sight. The white marble on this building shines radiantly in the morning, and yet I think the same is also true with the birth of many Federal programs. There is usually great joy at the sunrise of a new Federal law to meet a genuine need across the country. But sometimes an initiative fails to fulfill its promise. Sometimes a new Federal program has unintended consequences either through misinterpretation by the courts or misapplication by the bureaucracy. Somewhere between the Potomac and the Rio Grande, some Federal efforts that began as a bright shining idea get so misdirected that many Americans get only a bad sunburn. Well, Congress we know is great at creating Federal programs because we have hundreds of them to prove it. But too often after creating a program to address some real need, Congress subsequently fails to conduct proper oversight of its handiwork. It has been said that the nearest thing to immortality in this world is a government bureau, and certainly that is true of too many of the programs that were created in the sunrise in this particular institution. We find the sun coming up on these programs, but seldom seeming to go down. In my home State of Texas, we found a solution for too much government sun. We forced periodic review of each new governmental initiative through a systematic sunset process.”