“Senator, do you think in our Congress we'll ever be able to get rid of the pork situation?”

“Well, first of all, you have to define ‘What is pork?’ I have quite often defined it as federal spending north of Memphis. [laughter from audience] … Do you know of any pork I brought to Mississippi? The funds I've gotten for Oxford, the funds I've gotten for DeSoto County, the highway money? Is that pork? The 100 million for the Greenville bridge? That, why that's not pork, is it? And of course, the story of how that happened was Richard Shelby from Alabama was chairman of the transportation appropriations subcommittee and he came over and said, Trent – I was majority leader then and you know I got to call up bills or not – and he said, you know, we've got about 300 million left here in our allocation and I was wondering what you thought we ought to do with it. I said, well let's be fair. You take a hundred, I'll take a hundred, and we'll let the rest of the country have the remaining hundred. And it seemed fair and that's what we did. [Laughter from audience].”