Political Quotes

“I just say to my friend who just spoke, this is not about staying engaged with the Vietnamese. We are fully engaged. We have normalized relations. We have full trade with Vietnam. Those policies are not in question. What is in question, though, is about, and we are not refighting the Vietnam war. We are fully engaged in this. Although the Vietnamese are showing some improvement in the area of emigration with the Rover program and others, I think they are woefully short of meeting the threshold that would allow us to use American tax dollars to subsidize American businesses doing business in Vietnam. I have from my own district Dr. Nguyen Dan Que and Doan Viet Hoat, who are still languishing in Vietnamese prisons, on trumped up charges, for 15 years. Their families are not allowed to visit. When I was there last January, I was not allowed to visit. They are not allowed to get correspondence. They are not allowed to emigrate and come back to Northern Virginia, where they would like to join their families. We are in a sense, by ignoring existing prisoners there who are there on trumped up charges, rewarding behavior that is woefully short of the kinds of gains that we have seen in China and other places. I do not think this behavior should be rewarded, their human rights abuses being rewarded with tax subsidies from U.S. taxpayers.”