Gerry Connolly

Vietnam is a signatory, and has acceded to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It is a matter of international law, they have signed on the dotted line themselves, and these rights are being violated with impunity.

My hope is, given the fact the situation has markedly deteriorated, that will hopefully improve its chances so that we can send a clear unequivocal message to Hanoi that we are serious about human rights abuses.

Despite the country's transition to greater economic freedom, religious and political freedoms for Vietnamese citizens remain limited.

This bill is important as to way to shine a light on the desperate situation for many survivors in our community and I support it.

He will be sorely missed as a colleague and as a friend.

Don didn't take the Africa Subcommittee issues as an academic exercise.

Nobody brought more passion to issues affecting the African continent than Don Payne.

When I think of Don Payne and watch him in this committee, I think of three words--passion, witness, and honor.

Amendment to the amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 1410 offered by the Honorable Gerald E. Connolly, a Representative in Congress from the Commonwealth of Virginia.

We need to highlight that kind of statistic more. We need to educate our colleagues around here that it aint all the same.

It is penny-wise and pound-foolish not to have highly skilled, highly trained managers of big, large contracts.

We have to get out of this mindless narrative that all spending is the same and all spending is bad.

Would it surprise you to learn that as a matter of fact the answer to that is they went down both years for the first time in the history of the program?

In your testimony, you talked about how the Affordable Health Care Act actually helped reduce Federal outlays and long term actually will contribute to deficit reduction.

Would it be fair to say that when you look at the fact that we are at 25 percent spending, which is too high, higher than it was last time we balanced the budget, but revenue is too low, relative to that record, that we have to address…

I might add for the record that I was in the private sector when, in order to get NAFTA to meet some arithmetic need, they found some current revenue...

Again I find myself in agreement with Senator Coburn.

If we could remove sort of the incendiary agendas on each side and actually just look at the merits, there would be a lot of common ground around here.

I think it is very important that we move beyond the mindless narrative that government is just big, bloated, and fat.

If we really are serious about debt reduction, here is a vehicle for trying to get at savings.

Countries around the world advance by emancipating civil society, not by suppressing it.

The unethical conspiring against Egyptian civil society is in no way a national objective or in the national interest.

We do not view this situation as a legal matter involving rule of law, nor do 29 Egyptian organizations who issued a statement yesterday in Cairo.

Somebody within the fold of the Egyptian Government... decided consciously to pick a fight with the United States.

Somebody made a decision consciously to do this. This was not an accident. They didn't stumble into it.