Bob Filner: “before I get to these specific bills, let me just say, as chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, we are…”

“before I get to these specific bills, let me just say, as chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, we are at a critical time in our Nation in dealing with our veterans. George Washington said it best over 200 years ago when he stated that ``the morale of our active duty troops depends foremost on how they sense they're going to be treated when they come home.'' So we have a lot of work to do. We have a Secretary who has announced his resignation. Recently, just last week, the Dole-Shalala Commission released its report on some major changes for the VA and the DoD for the way we deal with our veterans and our wounded warriors. We need someone in that position, I think, who will shake things up a bit, who will not only do the Dole- Shalala recommendations, but go further and really talk to two bureaucracies that have to do business far better than what they do. Too often, VA means for our veterans ``veterans adversary'' instead of ``veterans advocate.'' We have older veterans, like we're going to be dealing with in the bill up now, and we are going to have hundreds of thousands of new veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a critical job that we must do. And I always say, no matter where we are in the war in Iraq, we're going to make sure that every young man and woman who comes back from the war gets all the love, the care, the attention, the honor, the dignity that a Nation can bestow. So we have a big job to do.”