Political Quotes

“I want to join Chairman Rogers in his effort to oppose this amendment. Mr. Chair, as we know, this is one of the annual reoccurring Representative Blumenauer's reductions of nuclear weapons efforts. And I would support reducing spending on nuclear weapons if we were talking about Mr. Putin's reducing his funding on nuclear weapons or Russia reducing their funding on nuclear weapons, which we know they are not going to do. So this is a continued unfortunate exercise of discussing unilateral reductions in the United States' funding its nuclear weapon deterrent, which is a dangerous thing to do, especially as Mr. Putin is continuing his efforts to escalate conflict throughout the world and also is looking to increase his overall nuclear weapons capability. Now, the other thing is, this isn't even needed. The bill already provides the budget request level of $117.5 million to purchase 17 of these radars that would be purchased under this amendment, 15 of which will go to the Air Guard, and it is certainly a prudent and efficient investment, but, additionally, the HASC bill also funds the National Guard and Reserve equipment account, which, if the Air Guard really thought they needed these radars, they could go buy them from that without turning to our nuclear deterrent. So why would this be damaging?…”