Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlelady for yielding. This bill is not about the offset. This bill is not about whether we're going to pay for emergency spending. We must and we will. What this bill is about is whether we're going to help 427 residents of Pittsfield, Vermont, who were in the wake of the wrath of Hurricane Irene. That flood came down and ripped their road to the north and ripped their road to the south, and the water went in the middle, taking out homes and taking out public buildings. That's the selectboard-- volunteers. It was that volunteer fire department--volunteers. They didn't have time to have an argument about offsets. They had to find out how they could get an excavator in there, and if they didn't have one, they had to borrow one. They had towns that weren't leveraging some disputes they might have had about whether they would turn back an excavator or earthmoving equipment to help them out. They did it. They had their school running the next day, not because they had a school that was functional--their kids couldn't even get out. They did one thing first, and that was to set up school on the green. They set it up on the green. Two days after this hurricane, the kids were going to school, and their parents were making them feel secure. They couldn't get to a passable road for several days. What did they do? They cut a path through the woods so that, for half a mile, kids could walk and get to transportation.…”