Political Quotes

“yesterday I came to the Senate floor to discuss two amendments I had filed to the budget agreement that would have addressed an egregious part of this agreement, which is the cuts to military retiree benefits. In particular, I think the most egregious part of it is to those who have been disabled. We have all been to Walter Reed and seen and met our brave heroes, some who have lost limbs, serving our country in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet in this agreement we are cutting their cost-of-living increases for the retirement they earned on behalf of our country. So yesterday I came to the floor to talk about what I think is an appalling part of this budget agreement, but also to say, Why can't we amend the budget agreement and fix this now? I offered two possibilities of how we could do that with two amendments I filed on this budget agreement. I am sure others could find in the trillions of dollars CBO has said we are going to spend over the next 10 years--$47 trillion--we can find $6 billion rather than taking it from our military retirees. What happened yesterday on the floor was there was a motion to take down the tree so we could actually amend this budget agreement and fix provisions such as that, and it was voted down. So now we have no ability to amend this budget agreement, so I cannot bring the amendments I talked about yesterday to help our military retirees and ensure they do not get singled out in this agreement, which I think is appalling and wrong.…”