Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to this amendment. First, I know the majority feels this is just a technical fix to an administrative error, but it raises an important issue, again, for us to discuss now on the House floor, and we should debate the merits of the underlying provision. First of all, the Secretary of Defense is already charged with compiling this information, and we have already put in place a full and transparent oversight framework with publicly available reporting. As we debated in committee, the DNI is not the place to conduct such a review and report. We need the intelligence community focused on gathering and analyzing intelligence that is vital to our national security. So, pulling our national-level intelligence staff and resources away from those important missions to conduct a review that is already taking place--done by the DOD--is a poor use of resources and is just bad policy. I can say this, as one of the few members on the Intel Committee and HASC: The place we should be debating this is the Intelligence Authorization Act, not the National Defense Authorization Act. So, there are jurisdictional issues here, which is one of the reasons why I am opposed to this amendment. Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no,'' and I reserve the balance of my time.”