Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the fiscal year 2014 Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill and am pleased that we're bringing this bill to the House floor under an open rule. I want to commend Chairman Carter for the open, collaborative, and bipartisan process he has led this spring. There's a long history of bipartisan cooperation on this subcommittee that's critical for allowing us to focus on the Nation's domestic security needs. The funding allocation provided to the subcommittee hews closely to the overall spending figure requested by the President for the Department of Homeland Security, but I don't believe either number is fully adequate to provide DHS with the resources it needs to help keep the Nation safe. We have been able to fill a number of significant holes in the President's budget request, but that has necessitated creating some shortfalls in other areas. I want to make clear, however, that my support of Chairman Carter's efforts are in no way an endorsement of the overall discretionary spending caps adopted by the majority in the House budget resolution. Sequestration was intended to be a mechanism to force the parties to come together to address our long-term fiscal challenges. It was never meant, in itself, to be a tool for deficit reduction, and it certainly was never meant to be the basis for a discretionary spending cap on a budget resolution.…”