Political Quotes

“Mr. President, Chairman Reed has spoken eloquently in the last few minutes about the personal impact of this hold on general officer nominations, on what it means to families, what it means to careers, what it means to people who are coming up through the ranks because, make no doubt, this is not just affecting those people who have been nominated for general officer positions, but it ripples all the way down through the ranks. It is an unprecedented attack on the integrity of our military chain of command. As I say, Senator Reed talked about the impact on individuals. And tonight we are going to be talking about a lot of those individuals. But I would like to talk for a moment about the impact on the readiness of our force. The first thing to observe is that China and Russia have got to be loving this. They could not imagine that we would do something like this to ourselves to essentially decapitate the senior leadership of our military. If you step back and say: Wait a minute, look at what is going on here, nobody would believe that they could achieve something like this, that our adversaries could achieve something like this. But we are doing it to ourselves--or actually one person is doing it to all of us and to our country. This is a dangerous moment in the world. I serve on both the Armed Services and the Intelligence Committees, and the threats that we are facing right now are unprecedented in the history of this country.…”