Jim Cooper Quotes
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When I first came to Congress, the party was supposed to help you. Now, when a new member is sworn in, he or she is told what their dues are - how much they are expected to raise for the party for the next election. It's worse in the Senate. It turns the whole place into a money machine.
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Congress as a whole is less popular than it's been since polling was invented.
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Bush may be a strong leader in the war on terrorism, but on budget deficits he is missing-in-action.
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It's not just that families can't buy a home or start a business without some savings tucked away.
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Take the veto. Bush is the first president since James Garfield in 1881 not to veto a single bill. Garfield only had six months in office; Bush has had over four years.
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Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute have criticized Bush for his big increases in spending, which far exceed those of the Clinton era.
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True partisans draft legislation that gives themselves everything and their enemies nothing. They love bills that repulse and even disgust the other side. Today's politics have become an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, zero-sum game - it's not a contact sport but a blood sport.
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If taxpayers want better results from Congress, they must stop paying their elected officials for failure. After all, you get what you pay for.
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I think the job of leadership is to expand what can be talked about and to get consensus on the nature of the problem, and that is most of the job. Because once you do that, once you have diagnosis, treatment options are obvious.
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The President's budget pays for only six months of the war in Iraq and completely overlooks the transition costs of Social Security reform. The Administration always lied about the cost of the Medicare drug bill.
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Most of my folks back home think Social Security and Medicare are sacred commitments stronger than the strongest contract. And yet if you look at the details here in Washington, they're not even promises. They're scheduled benefits. I think we need to do all that we can to make sure those benefits are real.
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We need to take politics out of health care. Congress will cave to pretty much any special interest on the subject.
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In Congress, it's all pork, all the time.
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Well, where is the money? Show me the money? Our allies have put up a few billion dollars, but the American taxpayer has been required to shoulder the burden of this war.
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Aging nations have arteries clogged with obsolete laws, slowing blood flow and preventing oxygen from reaching all parts of the body politic. Physicians call this arteriosclerosis; historians see decline of empire.
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If we don't change, millions of American families are just one medical emergency, or one layoff, away from financial disaster and bankruptcy.
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Politicians are terrified of losing touch with folks back home but content to be clueless about government's failure to fix real problems.
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We are spending more money on bond holders than we are on our own citizens. It took 204 years to have this happen. The other party will not even allow a recorded vote on this issue so that we can see how people stand on that issue.
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First, the year 2004, the year past, the Comptroller General of the United States, David A. Walker, said that arguably it was the worst year in American fiscal history, clearly setting our Nation on an unsustainable path.
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Equality under the law is the slow triumph of hope over history.
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President Clinton was able to achieve budget surpluses despite a divided government.
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The U.S. government uses cash accounting. That is illegal for any enterprise of any size in America except for the U.S. government. Every for-profit business, every not-for-profit business, every state and local government has to use real accounting except for Uncle Sam.
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Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That's what Congress has come to.
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While tax refunds amount to substantial income for many Americans, current IRS rules do not allow taxpayers to directly deposit their refund into more than one account.