Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in about an hour we are going to take a vote that our servicemembers around the world will likely be watching. It is a critical vote on the amendment of my colleague from Vermont to blindly cut defense spending, taking a hatchet to the already agreed- upon Bipartisan Budget Act. We have heard from my colleague Jack Reed from Rhode Island, who is part of the strong leadership on the Armed Services Committee and just spoke out against it, and I am going to speak out against it. I am going to spend some time explaining what this means. This is not just one amendment. This has national implications, and if you are watching in America, I want you to think about what is really going on here. First of all, my colleague from Vermont says that it is a 10-percent cut, but it is going exempt military personnel and healthcare accounts--which is true as part of the amendment--but it is actually going to compensate for the other cuts, so it is actually a 14-percent across-the-board cut to the Department of Defense. That is the amendment we are going to vote on. To paraphrase one of our great Presidents, Ronald Reagan: There they go again. There they go again. I chair the Subcommittee on Readiness of the Armed Services Committee. One of the reasons I ran for the Senate in 2014 was exactly this issue of military readiness. As a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, I had a little bit of an up close and personal view on it.…”