John Kerry: “I will be very, very brief. First of all, this is an amendment that has absolutely no linkage, connection, nexus, or…”

“I will be very, very brief. First of all, this is an amendment that has absolutely no linkage, connection, nexus, or rationale for being part of an emergency appropriations for an earthquake. If you live in California, and you are waiting for the U.S. Senate to do something responsible, and to act with the kind of speed that we ought to on this, you would ask why the U.S. Senate is taking up a totally extraneous amendment. That is No. 1. No. 2, the substance of the amendment, what the Senator from Kentucky is asking us to state as a sense of the Senate, is not, in this Senator's view, an accurate reflection of the facts. This amendment states in its sense-of-the-Senate that the Senate has not been provided sufficient information to reach a conclusion about the circumstances surrounding the disclosure of protected Bush administration files. I would say to my colleagues that on the face of it, that is simply not true. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House Government Operations Committee, and the House Republican Policy Committee, have all been briefed by the IG personally.”