Thad Cochran: “the issue we are debating this morning is not new to the Senate. In May of this year, the Senate voted on a motion to…”

“the issue we are debating this morning is not new to the Senate. In May of this year, the Senate voted on a motion to invoke cloture so that we could proceed to consider the American Missile Protection Act. That motion was not successful. The vote was 59 in favor and 41 against. Therefore, we fell one vote short of invoking cloture so the Senate could proceed to debate the American Missile Protection Act. We have another chance today, Mr. President, to go on record in favor of considering this bill. So it should be put in context what we are voting for and what we are not voting for. We are not voting to pass the bill without any debate. That is not the issue. We are voting to proceed to consider the bill. Now let us put in context what the facts are today as compared with last May when we fell just one vote short of voting to consider this bill. At the time we voted in May, India had just tested--that very day-- for the second time, a nuclear weapons device. We were not aware that India was going to conduct that test. Our intelligence community was surprised. All the world was surprised. We used that example to urge the Senate to change our current policy on national missile defense, because the current policy is that we will make a decision to deploy a national missile defense system if we learn that some nation has developed the capacity to put us at risk, to threaten the security of American citizens with a ballistic missile system.”