Political Quotes

“We are going to vote on cloture on H.R. 3979 soon, which represents the agreement between the Armed Services Committees of the Senate and the House on the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015. I urge my colleagues--I know my good friend from Oklahoma, the ranking member, joins in this urging--to support cloture so we can enact this important bill into law. The Armed Services Committee approved the defense authorization bill by a 25-to-1 vote in May. In June, Senator Inhofe and I came to the Senate floor to urge Senators to begin to file amendments to the bill so we could work on a package of cleared amendments and try to identify relevant amendments that would need votes. We made the same request in July. When our efforts failed to bring about a unanimous consent to bring the committee-reported bill to the floor with an opportunity to offer relevant amendments, we began to meet with the House Armed Services Committee in an effort to reach a bipartisan agreement that could be presented to the two Houses for approval in the form of a new bill. We also established an informal clearing process pursuant to which we were able to clear 44 Senate amendments--roughly an equal number of Democratic and Republican amendments--which are included in the bill that is now before us. The process is far from ideal, but it was the best we could do under the circumstances.…”