Mike Levin: “it is now time for us to vote up or down on the nomination, for many reasons. The nomination has been before us for an…”

“it is now time for us to vote up or down on the nomination, for many reasons. The nomination has been before us for an adequate length of time for us to get the information our colleagues have asked for, but also there is the looming fact of sequestration. We need to have a Secretary of Defense who is not only in office but whose leadership is not in limbo but is there. Our troops need it. Their families need it. Our country needs it. As of today we have 66,000 military personnel in harm's way in Afghanistan. The President of Afghanistan has just directed the United States to remove its special operations forces from a key Afghan province. Our military faces key decisions about the pace of the drawdown between now and the end of 2014, the size and composition of a residual force, and the terms and conditions for the ongoing presence in Afghanistan of the United States and our coalition partners after 2014. At the same time we face new and growing threats elsewhere, including the ongoing threat posed by Iran's nuclear weapons program and the increasingly destructive civil war in Syria, with the risk that that conflict could result in the loss of control over that country's substantial stockpile of chemical weapons.…”