Political Quotes

“I am coming to the floor today to offer a very straightforward, commonsense amendment that is noncontroversial, that has met all of the requirements set out by the Democratic leadership--by the majority leader--by the chair of the conference, and by the ranking member of the conference to be accepted. This is language that must accompany the research dollars that are part of the CHIPS+ legislation that we are considering right now. When you add it all up, when you add up CHIPS and the CHIPS+ language, which includes research dollars to NSF, NIH, Department of Energy, and so on, we are talking about $200 billion of taxpayer money. As part of this process, when we passed the underlying bill, USICA, here in the U.S. Senate, we included language that said: You know what, we ought to protect that language. We ought to protect that research. It is like we are buying a really expensive new car, and if we don't protect it, it means we are not buying the insurance that goes with it. The insurance is needed for a very simple reason: We know that for the past two decades, that U.S. taxpayer-paid research--just like the research that we are about to both appropriate and authorize in this legislation--has been subject to being taken by our adversaries, particularly China. So that is why we need to protect it. We worked painstakingly over the last 4 years on a bipartisan basis to come up with this legislation. Again, it has been fully vetted.…”