Political Quotes

“thank you very much, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here on the Senate floor today with my colleagues. I, too, have an amendment to strike section 1023 of this bill, the national defense authorization bill, S. 2943. This is amendment No. 4068. We will seek unanimous consent for this amendment to be considered, but what it does is strike section 1023, which provides for the design and planning related to construction of a facility in the United States to house detainees. This is part of the constant effort by some to close Guantanamo Bay and bring the detainees to the United States. In my view, it is essential for the United States to maintain the ability to hold terrorists, both those who were captured in 2002, as well as those whom we may find on the battlefields of terrorism with ISIS today. Since 2008, the effort has been to close Guantanamo Bay with the objective of bringing those detainees to the United States. This Congress, this Senate has spoken time and time again both in the predecessors' legislation to this bill we are considering today, NDAA of past years, as well as the appropriations process in which we prohibit those detainees from being brought to the United States and housed in a facility in the United States. In fact, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense have, on numerous occasions, confirmed that the President has no legal authority to close Gitmo or to transfer detainees to the United States.…”