On the recordDecember 17, 2010
this has been an important week for me, the most junior Senator. We passed bipartisan legislation to prevent a huge scheduled tax increase from hitting our Illinois economy in the teeth of a great recession, and we did this with the support of our President, Barack Obama, whose name is on this very Senate desk. We stopped a 1,924-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill with 6,600 earmarks, which was a big victory for restraint on spending. We stopped a House effort this morning to permit Guantanamo Bay terrorists to be transferred to the heartland--likely to Thomson, IL. The revised House bill that just passed now prohibits such a transfer. Now to the issue at hand. Madam President, I rise in support of this amendment. In my view, the underlying assumptions of the 20th century's Cold War are breaking down. Under the old doctrine of mutual assured destruction, we assumed the Soviet leadership did not want to commit suicide, and neither did we. In the balance of terror, defenses against attack were ignored--banned even, under an outdated treaty--because the assumptions were relatively sound. These assumptions are breaking down in the 21st century. We face a future in which nations will have nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. Recall that nuclear technology is 1930s-era engineering and missile technology is 1960s-era engineering.
