Political Quotes

“Over and over again we hear on the floor, we hear outside this body the importance of coming together in a bipartisan manner and what we can do to resolve issues for the American people. The unfortunate thing is when we try to do that, as we have done in this bill and we bring this bill in a bipartisan manner, sometimes my friends on the other side of the aisle simply can't take yes for an answer. And when we hear presentations like we just have, Mr. Speaker, I feel it is incumbent upon me to stand up and just correct some of those facts. The first thing is that the COPS program has been authorized in the 2005 Department of Justice authorization bill through 2009 for $1.047 billion. All this authorization will do is increase that to $1.15 billion through 2013. In addition, when you see these lines that drop off with the number of cops that are being hired, one of the things that we have heard from the testimony that we've had is twofold. One of the reasons that we had declines in the crime rate was not just because of the numbers of police officers, but more importantly, not just because we sent money, but because throughout the 1990s we had a lot of policies from Republican legislators across the States that did things like abolish parole, that did things like mandatory sentences, that did things like truth-in-sentencing that took criminals off the streets and out of our communities.”