Political Quotes

“I thank my good friend, Mr. McGovern from Massachusetts, a distinguished member of the Rules Committee, with whom I spent 5 hours last night. I wish my friend Mr. Kelly were still here on the floor because he reminds us we take an oath when we become a Member of Congress and at the beginning of every new Congress to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States. We don't take an oath to look at the best polling for our respective parties and pursue--no matter what--the issues that rile up our base. At the Republican retreat earlier this year, two issues polled real well with their base: Benghazi and the IRS. Sadly, cynically, we are here today--irrespective of the constitutional rights of an American citizen who happened to be an IRS employee--bending and genuflecting at the altar of that polling data to fire up that base. We are not here defending the Constitution, because if we were, we would be invoking our own history. There was a sad period known as the McCarthy era in this very body where constitutional rights of citizens--Federal employees and non-Federal employees--were trampled upon. The Fifth Amendment right is one of only 10 enumerated in the Constitution, and for a reason, because staying in the memories of our early colonists were the star-chambers that had occurred in Great Britain, the parent country, and even here.…”