William H. Crawford Quotes

My grandfather was a popular senator, known as an advocate for fiscal responsibility, including the line-item veto for the president.

I object to you using words like squander and pork. What is pork in one part of the country is an essential project in another part.

Those members of Congress who want to bring back pork to their districts should stand up proudly and be counted.

The President should have full opportunity ... of opposing whatever appropriations seemed to him objectionable without imperiling the success of others.

The best legislator is the one who votes for all appropriations and against all taxes.

I don't care what kind of speeches you make as long as you don't vote against the appropriations.

When you’re spending 24 billion dollars in pork barrel transportation projects how can you go to the American people and talk about tax increases.

We don’t care what the cost-benefit is. We’re going to build it somehow because Congress says it’s going to be built.

People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.

Let me make it clear: The Disbursement Allocation Program is not pork barrel. Of the DAP releases in 2011 and 2012, only nine percent was disbursed for projects suggested by legislators. The DAP is not theft. Theft is illegal.

I have never been opposed to earmarks.

Congress passes bills that appropriate money. Congress says, 'We're building this bridge or funding that defense project, and they cost this much.'

The President sends us a billion-page paper that shows how he would spend the money if he were spending the money. He doesn't have the authority to spend the money. He doesn't spend $1 of the money.

There's a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.

If we had decided on January 5, in the new House of Representatives, to make no new spending bills, the debt ceiling would've still been hit, because, those are bills that are coming in as a result of purchases and commitments made by the administration and the previous Congress.

I'm not giving the president a blank check, period.

Congress, of course, is not bound to accept the president's budget figures, but the House has the sole power to appropriate funds for spending, and it is a duty that should not be ignored.

The pork part of the budget is reaching new highs.

Homeland Security money ought not to be allocated on a pork barrel basis.

When the Budget has once been approved by the President and transmitted to Congress, it is his budget estimate and no officer or official of the War Department would have any right to come up here and attempt to get a single dollar more than is contained in that estimate .

George W. Bush is a big spender…. When Congress sends up a bill with big. fat, crackling pork, he says, “Where’s the barbecue sauce?”

If you think that my job is to rob the Federal Treasury on your behalf, you have voted for the wrong man

Remember that every dollar spent by the federal government is spent in somebody's district.

Local groups demand that their representatives and senators bring home the "bacon" or else .... They want economy practiced on the other fellow but not on themselves.

Under no circumstances will I allow expenditures upon works not clearly national.