Anthony Weiner: “first of all, let me just acknowledge that I agree with much of what the gentleman says, except the part about us…”

“first of all, let me just acknowledge that I agree with much of what the gentleman says, except the part about us gutting anything. What we did is we took the space exploration program and limited the increase to 10 percent. We by no means cut it to last year's level. We by no means slashed it to the bone. What we did is we took a program that grew the most and said, we are going go allow it to grow only 10 percent in the alternative. I want to point out the program that did get slashed to the bone, which was the COPS hiring component. You know, if you have a COPS program which put 117,000 police officers on the street and you say, we are going to reauthorize it but we are not going to provide any funding to do the hiring component, then we are going to start seeing what we are seeing now, which is, nationwide the seven index crimes are starting to creep up again. We saw the single best Federal program against crime perhaps in history was the COPS program, and despite the protestations of some of the folks who were here at the time, it was distributed throughout the country. Now the COPS department at Justice in the hands of the Republican party fervently says, you know what, having a COPS program without having hiring in it is like having no COPS program at all. Also, in the reauthorization, we acknowledged in a bipartisan way some of the weaknesses of the program. Some departments said, you know what, the way it was structured was too limited.…”