Pedro Pierluisi Quotes
A territory cannot become a state or a nation unless Congress approves legislation and the president signs it.
Pierluisi, Pedro. Prepared Statement. Political Status of Puerto Rico: Hearing Before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, U.S. Government Printing Office, 2013, p. 19.
In 2012 the Republicans controlled the House but not the Senate or the White House. As the nation grows, the Congressionally voted budgets have implications and the budget ceiling has to be raised to balance the two. That had always been a bipartisan process over the life of the nation. However, the Republicans in the House decided that they would hold the debt ceiling legislation hostage to pressure the Senate and the White House to pass legislation that the majority of the Senate and the President thought was bad for the country. Krugman advised the President and the Senate to resist giving in to this blackmail even if the debt ceiling was hostage to their demands.
Under his leadership the conservative Republicans had attempted and failed dozens of times to repeal Obamacare which many Republicans campaigned against in the 2012 Presidential election which they also lost. The irony was that even if a repeal were to possibly pass both housed of Congress, President Obama announced that he would veto the repeal. This futile and repetitive wast of time took place where the House was so extreme that it originated almost no legislation that every became law. The conservative Republicans had opposed every attempt to provide a national health system since they blocked President Truman from it. Yet Medicare was passed and became one of America’s most popular programs. Conservatives blocked all efforts to expand Medicare to cover all Americans until President Obama in his first term passed Obamacare. Since then they made all these attempts to repeal it.
The area covered by TVA was uniformly poor and backward, Those areas were among the poorest of each of the States they were in Professor Odium advocated making the area a state so that the government would place priority on the areas which rarely received any from the State Governments. He thought the sociological homogeneity would become a state with common interests. ironically, the State governments that did not think the areas were important enough to invest much money in developing them didn’t want to lose control over them either. The main economic reason was that they were the source of much of the coal in America. Then there was the reality that no government wants to control less land area and fewer people.
Pedro Rafael Pierluisi Urrutia is a Puerto Rican attorney, lobbyist, and politician who has been serving as the 14th Governor of Puerto Rico since January 2, 2021.
