BUDGET HYPOCRISY: “I do not know how anyone can say with a straight face that when we voted to cut spending last week to help achieve deficit reductions, we can now then turn around two weeks later to provide tax cuts that exceed the reduction in spending. That is beyond me, and I am sure the American people.”
-- November 10, 2005, Senator George Voinovich (R-OH), quoted in the Washington Post discussing the one GOP bill that would cut taxes for the wealthy by $60 billion to $70 billion and another GOP bill that would cut $35 billion to $50 billion in federal support for college, the poor, and other federal spending. A close vote is expected in the House today on the budget cuts. Representative George Miller (D-CA) opposes the bill.
BUDGET PRIORITIES: “It makes no sense for Congress to bang heads over spending cuts and still wind up with a bigger deficit simply because they can’t control their urge to cut taxes. It’s like running around the block and then chowing down on a burger and fries.”
-- Robert L. Bixby, Executive Director of the Concord Coalition, which lobbies for balanced budgets, in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, November 4th, 2005.
CONGRESS: "It's a tough atmosphere. You have [Senator] Frist, [Representative] DeLay, the [Valerie] Plame case, and you have Democrats with a theme: the culture of corruption and incompetence. [Republicans] are concerned that next year could be a bad year."
-- An unnamed Republican lobbyist in the Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2005.
COASTAL OIL DRILLING: "Republican leaders are shamelessly exploiting the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the disruption it caused to our energy supplies to promote their long- sought radical energy policy ... [and] devastate vast amounts of America's most prized environmental possessions."
-- Representative George Miller, quoted by the Associated Press on September 27, 2005 regarding a new energy bill sought by Republican House leaders. See full story here.
NATIONAL PRIORITIES: “The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch. Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.”
-- Columnist Tom Friedman, from the New York Times, September 7, 2005. Click here to read the editorial.
TEACHER QUALITY: “Representative George Miller, a key Democratic supporter of the Leave No Child Behind law, has proposed bold new legislation to provide incentives to exemplary teachers to work in so called "high need" schools.”
-- Editorial, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, July 31, 2005. Click here to read it.
KARL ROVE: “In 2003, [White House Press Secretary Scott] McClellan said it was ‘a ridiculous suggestion’ that [Deputy Chief of Staff Karl] Rove was involved [in identifying a CIA operative]. ‘I've made it very clear, he was not involved, that there's no truth to the suggestion that he was,’ he said. He also said that any culprit in the White House should be fired ‘at a minimum.’ . . . McClellan demurred yesterday [Monday] when asked several times whether Bush will stand by his pledge to fire anyone who leaked classified information. ‘This question is coming up in the context of this ongoing investigation,’ he said. ‘Our policy continues to be that we're not going to get into commenting on an ongoing criminal investigation from this podium.’
-- A story in The Washington Post, July 12, 2005.
“Baseball is an exciting sport, but the abuse of power by congressional Republicans is a dirty game and it must be denounced at the highest level. Their comments were neither cute nor innocent. They were a conscious effort to intimidate the League and everyone else to step in line with the GOP – or else. This is not how governments act in a free society.”
-- Representative George Miller, in sending a letter to Speaker Hastert regarding Republican threats made to Major League Baseball about the possible sale of the Washington Nationals to a group of investors that includes Democratic supporter George Soros. Click here to see the letter.
VETERANS HEALTH CARE: “The Bush administration, already accused by veterans groups of seeking inadequate funds for health care next year, acknowledged yesterday that it is short $1 billion for covering current needs at the Department of Veterans Affairs this year. The disclosure of the shortfall angered Senate Republicans who have been voting down Democratic proposals to boost VA programs at significant political cost. Their votes have brought the wrath of the American Legion, the Paralyzed Veterans of America and other organizations down on the GOP.”
-- News Story, Washington Post, June 24, 2005. See the story
here.
SOCIAL SECURITY: “Mr. Bush has reacted by railing against Democrats for obstruction - as if Democrats are duty-bound to breathe life into his agenda and, even sillier, as if opposing a [Social Security privatization] plan that the people do not want is an illegitimate tactic for an opposition party. Rather than accept defeat and consider alternatives, Mr. Bush is becoming even more feckless as public and political opposition mounts. On Tuesday, in a lame ploy to draw the Democrats to the table, he gave tepid approval to a proposal by Robert Bennett, the stalwart conservative senator from Utah, to restore the system's solvency in a way that would not include private accounts - all the while saying that he was not prepared to give up private accounts. . . . A group of four Republican representatives have meanwhile offered a proposal that would, in effect, abandon efforts to restore solvency in order to resuscitate those doomed, unwanted, unwise private accounts. Enough is enough. Mr. Bush must either put forth a complete plan - including details of the risks, benefit cuts and borrowing costs that privatization would entail - or abandon his quest. Anything other than that is wasting his own and, by extension, the American people's time.”
-- New York Times editorial from June 23, 2005
SOCIAL SECURITY – A REAL CRISIS? "Now I have said to the President, I've said it to all of his advisers, and I've said to all of our folks, 'Look it, you can't jam change down the American people's throat unless they perceive there really is a problem.'"
-- February 11, 2005, Speaker of the House Dennis J. Hastert (R-IL), as reported in today’s Chicago Tribune.
SOCIAL SECURITY: MSNBC's Olbermann: "The quote about Social Security from George W. Bush read as follows: 'I think it will be bust in 10 years unless there are some changes. The ideal solution would be for Social Security to be made sound and people given the chance to invest the money the way they feel'. ... It was from his Congressional campaign in 1978. Unless you and I did not get the memo, Social Security did not go bust in 1988. Today the president giving as the year 2042. That is the new estimate for the collapse of Social Security"
-- "Countdown," 2/3/2005
“I think we see an acknowledgment now by the administration that all this can be seen as propaganda wars, an attempt to influence or even buy off, people who compete in the marketplace and offer their opinions as pundits and commentators by also putting them on some kind of government contract.”
-- Howard Kurtz, Washington Post reporter, on CNN, 1/26/2005. See the report (pdf file) and press release from Congressman Miller.
HOUSE ETHICS SCANDAL: "[Republicans] substituted a cute gutting of the ethics machinery for a flagrant gutting of the ethics machinery. What was attempted in the first place - making it harder to examine legitimate cases of alleged misbehavior by members - has simply been achieved by different means."
-- Thomas Oliphant, article from the Boston Globe, January 6, 2005. For a link to the full article, go to: http://www.boston.com/.
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