Political Quotes

“I want to go back to the missile defense portion of this thing a little bit. Let me make it clear that when the negotiations were held with the chairman, the ranking member, a number of leaders from the other body, and the President's representative, he gave us a long laundry list of things he thought were wrong with the bill. When I asked him directly what he had to have out, what had to be taken out for the President to sign the bill, the answer I would characterize as evasive. Now, we had a series of meetings with them. At least my feeling was, my impressive was, that if we took out one of the three basic elements of missile defense, that is, the multiple site designation, that the President would probably sign the bill. We took that out, and the gentleman from South Carolina has risen up again and has given us a long litany of other things he thinks the President based his decision on. Let me just say this: I think he has defined the issue fairly well. The President does not think it is in the interests of the United States of America to defend against incoming ballistic missiles. He feels we should not do that, because if we do that at some point we either have to renegotiate the ABM Treaty or we have to break it. The problem is there are other countries besides the two countries that signed the ABM Treaty. We signed the ABM Treaty, the Russians signed it, and the North Koreans did not sign the ABM Treaty.”