Richard Shelby

For years, I have urged regulators to implement strong capital requirements. I believe they are essential for a safe and sound banking system and also to avoid taxpayer bailouts.

Unfortunately, too many of the efforts we see in Congress right now are intended to undermine and roll back regulation--ultimately putting Americans back at risk.

Unfortunately, when pressed to do further analysis on the effectiveness of our capital and liquidity rules, our banking regulators have balked.

Our job is to make sure that if Iran rejects comprehensive reforms, that it has no one to blame for its economic troubles other than itself.

Congress must continue to provide close oversight and support robust military and other aid to regional partners like Israel.

Time and again, Iran's actions have demonstrated that this deal has placed the U.S. in a position of weakness and given Iran the upper hand.

I hope my colleagues will not try to relitigate the JCPOA by trying to reimpose old nuclear sanctions under new labels.

There is already a growing belief that this Administration has little interest in preserving the tools it would need to reimpose sanctions, should Iran violate the terms of the deal.

Yes, it continues to conduct illicit financing, sending hundreds of millions of dollars to groups like Hezbollah.

We have a resurgent Russia under Putin, who seems to be very venturesome, to say the least, and nobody to rein him in.

We have a China that thinks long range, that we do a lot of trade with, but is determined to modernize their nuclear weapons system.

The only people I know that can rein him in would be China, if they chose to.

I see that as a real danger.

We want to get through it, but we don't want to jeopardize anything for American security to do that.

Secretary Kendall, will you and your staff continue to work with this subcommittee on ensuring that the department, Secretary of Defense, intelligence, everything, can acquire the engines that you say you need for national security?

We found out in 1945 that the Germans were, overall, much farther advanced than we were, dealing with missiles and so forth.

What does $2 billion mean? We can replace every Humvee in the Marine Corps, increase pay raises for our troops by 2.

We can't defend this Nation with yesterday's weapons when you have potential competitors or adversaries moving to the next level.

Let's talk about the replacement engine, which this committee has funded the research and development.

When we field superior capabilities, we give our potential adversaries more reasons to pursue peace, and our military more options to win any fight.

If we don't use Russian engines in transition while we're building this American engine, we're forced to use Delta engines through the United Launch Alliance.

The idea that we can be challenged in terms of technological superiority is something that people don't take very seriously initially.

The third offset strategy is based on the idea that we need to be as creative and innovative as we can to find some new ideas and new technologies.

It could be a national security cost plus a physical cost, could it not?

We all want to get rid of the dependence to some extent on the Russian engine. I think that is a given.