Would you all agree that giving more servicemembers more retirement benefits is a good thing?

This is a very, very important matter to me.

We owe it to them to provide them with something more than they are getting today.

If there are documented savings and there are things we can realize, versus on paper savings, then there is something to be said for turning those savings back into even more benefits for the veterans.

if you like your plan, you can keep it

The Cuban people are the only people in this hemisphere that have not had a free and fair election in the last decade and a half.

I believe every member of this committee this morning, as I do the vast majority of Americans and policymakers, share the goals of democracy and freedom on the island of Cuba.

I find this concerning given the fact that these are the two individuals who the administration put forward in negotiating the deal.

Did the negotiators reach out to you as someone in charge of the human rights portfolio?

Can you categorically say today we will never accept that condition on our personnel?

I hope that in a future Cuba, you will be able to organize yourselves into political parties if you so choose.

I have deep reservations and in many instances direct opposition to many of the changes that we are going to review here today.

Give me an example of a policy like this that you are implementing here today that has led, in the 20th or 21st century, into a reluctant tyranny becoming a democracy.

For the first time, certainly in my time in the Senate and probably in a decade, when something is going on in Cuba now, a human rights abuse, any sort of outrage, it now is news in the United States.

I have always felt that we ought to have more Americans traveling to Cuba, not fewer.

shifting the blame to America has worked for the Castro government.

Cuba's lead negotiator said in an interview broadcast on state television that if the United States want free movement for its diplomats in Cuba, it must stop using them to support the political opposition.

Our goal is to get dissidents out of prison, then push for the next step, and the next one after that.