James Norton: “This is an unusual procedure, because we are facing an unprecedented denial. In war and peace, there has always been pay…”

“This is an unusual procedure, because we are facing an unprecedented denial. In war and peace, there has always been pay parity. This is not the time to set up invidious comparisons between people who do the same kind of jobs, sometimes on the home front, sometimes overseas. It has never been considered a reflection on the military for there to be pay parity, and we ought not inject that into this debate now. We take nothing from their sacrifice now, as we have taken none in the past. We know we have a volunteer army. We know most of our troops are support troops. We know that almost all of them do the same things that we do in civilian life. There are very few, in fact, in combat. This is no time to break with pay parity, because if you think this will be remembered as the era of war, I tell you, this will always be remembered as the era of homeland security. This will be remembered as the era when we in fact called Federal employees to do what they have never had to do before, and that is to protect the homeland.”