Oversight Quotations

Really, politics should stop at the door of that committee. I don't know whether Roberts is right or Rockefeller is right. But I do know that when you lose bipartisan oversight by that committee, you lose something very, very important.

Recent mergers have given the industry a strangle hold over the health insurance market. With fewer pressures for efficiency and no government oversight of rates, insurers have been given free rein to spend more of our health care dollars on overhead, profit, and administration. The last decade of HMO mergers has taught us that when fewer HMOs dominate the health care market, quality goes down, premiums go up, and patients get short changed. Already, 45 million Americans are uninsured because they cannot afford to pay the insurers' ransom.

To be sure, this requires effort and love, a careful cultivation of the spiritual life, and a watchful, honest, active oversight of all one's mental attitudes towards things and people. It is not to be learned by world-flight, running away from things, turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, one must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.

This GAO report ... confirms my long-held suspicions: more can be done and more should be done to protect American investors. We need to ensure that the SEC's oversight of the mutual fund industry is adequate to protect consumers' investments and prevent abusive practices from developing again in the future.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar turned out to be all hat and no cattle with his sorry oversight of the Minerals Management Service.

We have since put in financial controls and oversight to try and prevent something like this from happening again.

Our preliminary review of these audits only underscores my long held concern about the fraud, mismanagement and lack of adequate oversight at the U.N.'s oil for food program,

As I reviewed the number of documents about John Roberts record, it is imperative that there is intensive oversight during the hearings, ... The Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment. We cannot afford to lose ground on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the affirmative action executive order in the Nixon White House, and the rights to fairness in the criminal justice system.

Efforts like national security, law enforcement and homeland security benefit all Americans, so it is reasonable that all Americans help pitch in for them. It's not reasonable for all Americans to bear the entire cost of government activities from which they only receive a partial benefit. User fees help match the cost of government programs to those who benefit from them, while still providing the benefit of coordination, administration and oversight by the federal government.

One of the focuses of the investigation will be the lack of regulatory oversight of government employees.