Political Quotes

“the Senate now is about to engage in a great debate, a debate that is very important to our country and, indeed, to the world. I had hoped that we could have postponed this debate somewhat, for a number of reasons. NATO itself is planning to put out a report on the requirements, costs and feasibility of enlargement sometime in May. Originally this debate was scheduled to come up in May, and now it has been moved up to mid-March. It is no secret that I am an opponent of enlargement, for reasons that I will go into somewhat today and, of course, later on as the debate continues. But I also feel very strongly--as some of my colleagues did who signed a letter to the leader, on both sides of the aisle--that we need more time to debate this, to understand fully what we are doing. I think that, when you first look at this issue, you might come to the conclusion that after being subjected to the tyranny of communism for 45 years, somehow these nations have earned a place in the NATO alliance. I think the nations certainly have earned their freedom, without question. They paid a heavy price for it. But so did the United States of America. We spent about $6 trillion in the Cold War to defeat Soviet communism. From the time I first came to the Congress, in 1985, I have been a strong supporter of our military and a strong supporter of the NATO alliance--which, by the way, is a military alliance, which sometimes I think people forget.”