Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to pay tribute to one of the finest staffers I have encountered in my years in the U.S. Senate. Roger Cockrell is retiring this week after 15 years of service to the Senate Appropriations Committee, which was proceeded by more than 20 years with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, mainly in Vicksburg, MS. I spent many years as either the chairman or ranking Democrat on the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee. It is a great bill. It not only funds a lot of important energy and science priorities, it also provides the annual funding for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, both of which are tremendously important to my home State of Nevada. Sorting through all of the projects and programs that are funded through these two agencies is tremendously technical and complicated work. I realized fairly early in my time at the top of that subcommittee that I needed an experienced engineer to ensure that we were prioritizing and funding these thousands of projects according to both technical merit and also national priorities. So, I brought in Roger as a fellow from the Corps of Engineers and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. As all Members have been known to do, I kept him as a fellow for as long as the Corps would pay him and then I hired him away.…”