Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I do not expect to be in opposition to this amendment at the close of the time. I think it is important to take time to talk about this, because I think, frankly, there has been a lot of misinformation about this issue. I want to thank the gentleman from Michigan and the gentlewoman from Illinois for their efforts to work with us to find what I think is a reasonable compromise, which I will come back to very shortly here in talking about it. There are two issues that are involved in this amendment. One is the cap on civilian contractors. That is section 3204(b)(1)(B) of public law 106-246. It refers to the cap on the number of civilian contractors that is a part of Plan Colombia funding that was enacted in the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill in fiscal year 2000. As part of the Plan Colombia supplemental, we put a cap both on military personnel and on civilian personnel. We did not want to get into another Vietnam. We wanted to try to avoid that, so this cap was placed specifically on there for that purpose. It was placed at a level of 500 persons on the military side and 300 on the civilian side.”