Texas’ national treasure speaks on history and the current state of government spending.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) urged her colleagues to reach a compromise to prevent spending cuts through sequestration, arguing that government programs are already as lean as they can be.
“We’re at the bone almost, and sequester, that is across-the-board cuts, will literally destroy us and put us in a recession,” she said on the House floor Wednesday.
She called on Republicans to meet Democrats at the negotiating table and rejected the idea that President Obama delivered a partisan State of the Union address Tuesday night.
Our Houston dynamo’s understanding of economics, and history, needs a little work.
“I stand here as a freed slave because this Congress came together. Are we going to be able to do it today to free America?”
Congress didn’t “come together” to free the slaves. Southern members of Jackson Lee’s Democratic Party seceded from the union to preserve slavery, triggering a civil war. Republican President Abe Lincoln freed the slaves, in whose number Lee never numbered as she was born nearly a century too late, via the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Lincoln’s proclamation was eventually added to the Constitution in the form of the Thirteenth Amendment, after Democrat actor John Wilkes Boothe assassinated Lincoln, in December 1865.
Not that the Hill bothers to correct Rep. Jackson Lee, who also thinks the US won the Vietnam war, and that NASA has landed humans on Mars.
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