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As a former minority leader who became the first Republican Speaker of the House in Florida since Reconstruction, I know that leadership is not an easy task.
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When you wait to the last minute, you rush to get things done, and the closer you get to the deadline, the less options you have.
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I changed that system in Florida when I was the Speaker of the House - I was the Minority Leader; I saw for 16 years the way a power system works.
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Principle says it's not who put forth an idea. It's not the position of the person who put forth an idea; it's not the longevity of the person or the party of the person. That's not what it is at all. In a power system, that's the way it works. But in a principle system, it's what it says.
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For most of my time in Tallahassee, I did a lot of transportation.
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I've been a speaker. I've been a majority leader. I've been a minority leader. Those are the sort of things I don't need any more.
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Every member in Congress has a seat, and they deserve a seat at the table.
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There's a picture there that people realize that, we stop helping Israel, we lose God's hand, and we're in big time trouble.
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The voters in District 8 shared our vision that Washington is broken, and we're going to go up there and fix it.
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Power says if you are a committee chairman, your idea is good only because you have got power.
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I would like to give evidence we can lead. And I think the only way we can do that is to unify the diversity of the party.
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You can think of all the things a Congress or a legislature does, and then you kind of overshadow that with the fact that a few people are going to make those decisions.
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Nothing happens in any legislative body that's not purposeful.
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I don't do anything political on Sundays.
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During its first year of operation, Florida Virtual School had 77 students. The next year, it had 476 students; then 2,489 students the year after that.
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All I want to do is get back to a principle-based Congress.
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I have saved $1,638,580 over my four years. That may not seem like a lot, faced with our deficit, but multiply it by 435 members of the House - and then the senators get three times as much - and you are adding up several millions in savings.
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You have got to clean your own house first before you tell other people that they aren't doing it right.
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Power focuses on self-preservation; principle focuses on making ideas successful.
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The policy is one thing, but it's dictated by what the process is.
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I always think I have a chance, and I always give it all I've got.
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The process for producing public policy in Congress is flawed. The process itself kills policy ideas through the bypassing of the rules and procedural decisions that limit discussion.
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The principle is that every member needs to represent their district.
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You lay out a plan and - say a three-year plan or a two-year plan - and say, 'This is what we can do. We can do the transportation packages, like the highway bill and the water bill, and we can do some of these other areas - a farm bill - whatever it is, we lay out a schedule, and we put that committee to work to do that.'