Barbara Mikulski

He is an independent thinker and is dedicated to the rule of law.

I take nominating judges very seriously, and I have four basic criteria.

I have the greatest confidence that Tom Perez will do that.

He brings thoughtful temperament, is well respected among his colleagues.

I hope we also take a look at all of the agencies and acknowledge the tremendous assets that we have in our Civil Service population.

Senator Shelby and I have deep, deep concerns about the census management.

The administration's announcement that the census would receive direct oversight by the White House staff is troubling.

This approach was reviewed by the Supreme Court during the 2000 Census.

We believe that when we work together, we govern best.

Thank you very much, and the record will so show that.

I also am going to reiterate what Senator Shelby said about the joint task forces.

We will support you in your people. We're going to support you in your technology.

We can't bring talented, smart people... into a dated facility.

We want to support the effort to modernize Quantico.

We've got to protect the American people by making sure the FBI has the right tools, and that's technology.

One needs to keep in mind, however, security.

Do you mean every agent doesn't have what everybody else has?

You're correct. Right now SENTINEL will go generally at the second level, which is the Secret level.

The FBI is one of the few agencies that operates in three enclaves in terms of the net: unclassified, Secret, and Top Secret.

It reduced our ability to surge resources within our Criminal Branch and meet existing and emerging threats.

The Census Bureau will hire 1.5 million workers.

I think that's fantastic.

I worry about the FBI in so many ways, about having the resources.

The census needs to be done on time and it's had significant technological failure and will need to be more manpower intensive.

But when you look at the importance of what we do, things like Hubble, the International Space Station, our exploration program, our climate observing, observing the Earth, the dynamic Earth, all of these things are so very important to…