this is an amendment to restore some sanity and common sense to the executive pay practices that have outraged all of us that we have seen on Wall Street among the biggest financial institutions in this country. It is very simple and…

In 2008, Senator Mikulski and I included the first ever funding of $17 million for Adam Walsh enforcement in a war supplemental funding bill.

Ending Constellation will devastate an industrial base critical to our national security.

the question should be: How can we afford not to fully support them and ensure that they remain indisputable factors in driving our Nation's technical, industrial and scientific excellence?

My No. 1 priority is astronaut safety. We must have a reliable transportation system to protect our astronauts during launch, mission execution, and reentry.

If Project Constellation is cancelled, our Nation will not, in the near-future, be able to travel beyond low-Earth orbit.

If we follow the administration's plan 'we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what will be discarded.'

That is why I am so concerned about the Obama administration's response to the Augustine panel report.

The Bush administration failed to request a single dime of funding to reimburse NASA for the cost of re-certifying the shuttle program for its return to flight after Columbia.

How can anyone believe it makes sense to follow this plan for purely budgetary reasons--when we have just spent close to a trillion dollars on short-term relief?

We owe it to the American people. We owe it to the taxpayers. And we owe it to the astronauts to be very clear about what we are going to do and how are we going to do it.

Despite what I believe is the compelling logic suggesting we reconsider the decision to terminate the space shuttle at the end of the current manifest, the administration has chosen to hide behind the Bush administration mistaken plan.