Political Quotes

“let me just say a few more words. We have been prevented from acting on the 9/11 recommendations. I should say that now we are in conference, and I am so appreciative of that. I understand Chairman Lieberman is going to hold his first meeting tomorrow. It took a while to get there, but that is important. But we also need to change the course in Iraq, and that didn't happen, and so now we have this. We have all seen and heard reports that our intelligence community has concluded that al-Qaida's strength has grown to its 9/11 levels, and the statement of the Secretary of Homeland Security that he has a gut feeling we are at greater risk of being attacked this summer by terrorists. In spite of all this, we have just seen an example of obstructionism that has slowed down and prevented the Senate from consideration of this bill today. The latest obstruction would delay important investments. This Homeland Security bill does lots of things. We just finished the immigration debate. This is not as good for border security as the immigration bill would have been--I don't expect we will do that debate today--but it does do some good things. This bill hires 3,000 more Border Patrol agents and provides 4,000 more detention beds. When someone is picked up, they will have a place to put them. This provides $400 million for port security grants. This bill provides $1.83 billion for State and local first responders.…”