Political Quotes

“I stand in front of this body, yet again, to urge the passage of the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our PACT Act. Before I get into my remarks, Senator Moran is on the floor, and I listened to a good portion of what he had to say. I just want to say thank you, Senator Moran. As a team member on the Veterans' Affairs Committee, for the last year and a half, we have been working in good faith to get a bill that addresses the challenges of toxic exposure that our veterans, quite honestly, have endured since World War I. With the burn pits and Agent Orange and radiation exposure that this bill addresses, I would just say that we would not be here today if we had not both committed to work together to get to a result that, hopefully--I was a little more sure last week than I am today, but, hopefully, we will get to a point where this bill passes. We have talked about this bill a lot, and we have talked about what it does. Basically, what it does is to make sure that the veterans who have been exposed to toxins--in this case, burn pits but also, as I said before, Agent Orange and radiation--are made whole again. So we get these folks; we train them to be warriors; and we send these men and women off to war. We tell them to go out and protect our freedoms and protect this country. They do it, and, oftentimes, things happen that change their lives. Sometimes those are injuries we can see, and sometimes we can't see them.…”