let me quote from the START I treaty, Text of Resolution of Advice and Consent to Ratification as Approved by the Senate: The Senate's advice and consent to the ratification of the START Treaty is subject to the following conditions, which…

I am a little bit flummoxed here because I thought in a conversation I had a couple of days ago with Senator Kerry that side agreements might be all right; that we didn't want to amend the preamble or didn't want to amend the treaty but…

In any event, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If we put a limitation on the United States on something they are not developing, then it is only fair to put a limitation on them with regard to something we are not…

I appreciate my colleagues' compliments about important issues being brought up, and I also appreciate their concern that amendments of this significance would cause heartburn for the Russians and might well require them to want to…

I wish to make a comment. For the benefit of Members, what we are trying to do is to identify those matters we need to try to deal with in the 30 hours postcloture on the START treaty. If Members have amendments they need to deal with, I…

I do think, though, that it would be appropriate to have a better response than just that this will upset the Russians, they won't want to do it, so we will have to renegotiate the treaty, and that it will delay things and that will create…

there was no delay in the implementation of the START I agreement because of a requirement that a side agreement be entered into between the then-Soviet Union and the United States on SLCMs. So I don't buy the notion that this necessarily…

I would have preferred to deal with each of the subjects in this amendment individually because each one is very important. To accommodate the other side's desire to try to get as much done as quickly as possible, we consolidated some…

Before my colleague from Nevada closes, I know this whole argument is based on the proposition that the Russians wouldn't be crazy enough to think about doing a rail system again so we don't need to worry about it. What is all the fuss, is…

I say to Senator Thune, I was not aware it would be cut in half. I was aware it would be drastically reduced. That is a huge reduction, especially if the administration is unwilling to commit that we are even going to have a…

I wish to talk about both the Thune amendment and the Inhofe amendment. With respect to the Inhofe amendment on verification, we are going to go into executive session of the Senate at 2 o'clock this afternoon, where there will be an…

What the amendment does is it removes language that relates to missile defense from the preamble. This treaty was supposed to be about offensive strategic weapons, not about missile defense. In fact, we were told by an administration…

Mr. President, the DREAM Act is an attempt to cure a symptom of a problem. The symptom is that some children have been brought here illegally and they are suffering the consequences of being illegal aliens under American law. The problem…

to say the treaty doesn't constrain the United States misses the point of the argument we have been trying to make over the course of the last day and a half. What the Russians have done is establish a legal pretext for withdrawal from the…

In other words, cloture cuts off both the resolution of ratification amendments as well as treaty and preamble amendments.

It cannot be insignificant but also be so important as to be a treaty killer. I suppose it is possible for one side to treat it as insignificant and the other side to treat it as very significant. Thus, insofar as the Russians are…

If the Senator will yield briefly, I ask to speak for just 60 seconds. I want to make it clear that I don't think anybody on this side holds Senator Kerry accountable for the fact that this is a confusing and back-and-forth kind of debate…

The answer is, under the terms of the treaty, they have a right to characterize something as an extraordinary event which qualifies under the terms of the contract between the two parties to withdraw. And it is also true that, technically…

Any lawyer--and we are both lawyers here--knows that if you have an ambiguity in a contract, you are asking for trouble. You are asking for litigation or dispute down the road. It may not be all that important between two parties or two…

Mr. President, we don't have time to get into a lot of detail, but there is the question of verification. This is one of the other major matters people have written about, including Senator Bond, who is the ranking Republican on the…

Bill Kristol, who is, I think, a very astute observer of these matters, wrote in the Washington Post in April of last year: Yet to justify a world without nuclear weapons, what Obama would really have to envision is a world without war, or…

I hope my colleague is not suggesting that, under no circumstances, should the Senate ever change a treaty so that the other party to the treaty would have to, in effect--well, the Senate would never be able to change a treaty. Put it that…

Let me jump in on a couple of points. First of all, it is in my opinion it is incorrect to suggest that the phased adaptive approach is superior to the ground-based or GBI approach. I know there are people in the military who came up here…

That is my point exactly. If it is no more than that, I cannot imagine that it would be a treaty killer for the Russians unless there was something else afoot. And that something else--they deem it very important. Why? This is the legal…

I will totally deny that I had anything to do with it. But I was involved in the negotiations for the Republican Senate side.