Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, my amendment would make a couple of slight changes to two new advisory boards created in this bill: the STEM education advisory panel and a new Department of Energy advisory committee. My amendment sets the total number of members for these two new advisory boards at 15 each, and most importantly, it ensures that five of the members on each board are chosen by Congress, three by the Speaker of the House and two by the Senate majority leader. The purpose of my amendment is to ensure that the advisory boards have congressional representation, that we have people on there who work with Congress. The legislative branch is a coequal branch of government, and I believe that, as an institution, Congress should more aggressively assert itself as a coequal branch. This amendment has nothing to do with which party controls the legislative branch of government or which party, for that matter, controls the executive branch at any given time, nor does it ask for a majority of the members of these new boards to be congressionally appointed. The amendment would simply ensure that the legislative branch is involved in these boards that it, the legislative branch, is creating and that we are involved in the process of creating the reports which both the legislative branch and executive branch will rely on to make important decisions for these United States.…”