Political Quotes

“I wanted to come down here because a single Senator in this Chamber, a colleague from Alabama, has put a blanket hold on every pending nominee and promotion of flag officers at the Department of Defense. As far as we can tell--and this might be the intention of the Senator from Alabama; I don't know whether he knows this or not--there is no precedent for what the Senator from Alabama is doing. There is no precedent for what he has done. It has never been done, stopping the U.S. Senate from taking up promotions for uniformed military officers. These are promotions that happen to people as a group. These are flag officers at the Department of Defense that we have to ratify here in the Senate. And we asked the Senate Armed Services--I couldn't believe it when I heard it. I couldn't believe it. But we asked the Senate Armed Services Committee if this had ever happened in the history of America, the history of the Senate; and the answer was, they have no record of that ever happening before. And it is happening at an incredibly unusual and difficult time in the world's history with the biggest land war in Europe since the Second World War, China's saber-rattling in the Pacific. We just had an hours-long open session of the Intelligence Committee to hear the report from the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the head of the NSA, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. All of these folks were coming together to say: This is what the threat looks like.…”