Political Quotes

“I do not think it would be possible for a Member of this body to defend more eloquently the mission of the National Endowment for the Arts or the place that the arts in the broadest sense of that term play in our society than we have just heard from the Senator from Texas. From the beginning of the debate over this issue she has taken a consistently supportive position but not a position that simply supports the status quo blindly. She helped draft the conditions a year or 2 or 3 years ago that prohibited the National Endowment for the Arts from making a broad range of individual grants that were the source of most of what the vast majority of the American people regarded as outrageous misuses of the taxpayers' money. And here today, she does not defend the status quo--though, essentially, the status quo is what is proposed by this bill in its present form--but is attempting to strengthen the Endowment by decentralizing the granting process to a significant degree, and by spreading it in a way that she feels is more equitable across all of the States and jurisdictions of the United States.”