Trent Lott: “I think all the answers that the distinguished Senator from Georgia received from the members of the Budget Committee…”

“I think all the answers that the distinguished Senator from Georgia received from the members of the Budget Committee, the Senator from Tennessee and the Senator from New Mexico, are accurate. First of all, though, I do want to speak on the defense part of the question. Obviously, what we are trying to do here is to accomplish the purpose of trying to avoid defense being cut more without it being subject to a point of order, which would then require 60 votes to overcome. That is why it is silent on 1995. But the intent of the amendment is clear. The intent is to say, look, we need to cut the deficit more. There are a lot of Members that would like to support Exon-Grassley, and I suspect probably the Senator from Georgia would, but he is concerned about the impact on defense. That is why it passed the Budget Committee with some 13 Senators voting for the Exon-Grassley amendment. They would like to reduce the deficit more. They would like more to come out of discretionary spending. But they would prefer it not to further cut defense, which, as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee knows, has already been cut 35 percent over the past years. We are always hearing testimony that is scaring us to death in the Armed Services Committee, and we worry about what is happening around the world. So we want to do that.…”