Political Quotes

“I rise in support of the National Defense Authorization Act. I rise in support to move this bill forward and the amendments that many of us in this body want to have heard, debated, and voted on. I also rise in opposition to obstruction--obstruction to this bill, obstruction to the key issues of national defense for our country. Make no mistake, there is obstruction going on, on the Senate floor right now, with regard to this important bill. A little bit of background here: This bill, the NDAA, came out of the Senate Armed Services Committee after a lot of hard work, bipartisan work, by all the members of the committee. We worked together to include over 185 amendments. Almost all of these were bipartisan amendments. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle talked about voting against the bill because they did not like the way it was funded, even though our committee had nothing to do with the funding. But at the end of the day, after much debate in the committee, we worked and passed a strong, important, reform-oriented bipartisan NDAA by a vote of 22 to 4. That is bipartisan. I thank the chairman of that committee Senator McCain and the ranking member Senator Reed on their great leadership in getting this committee to work so closely together to move the bill forward. As part of the Armed Services Committee, just 2 weeks ago, I had the distinct honor of traveling with both of them to Vietnam and to Singapore for an important Defense Ministry conference.…”