Political Quotes

“first of all, my good friend from South Carolina is a mind reader. He always looks at you and figures out what you are going to say and then he says it better. There are a couple of things that haven't been said during this discussion, and I want to mention them, and then I know we are going to vote. One is that our military was told--and I talked to several of the groups, the military retiring groups and others--that they would be grandfathered in. Now, I want everyone grandfathered in if we are going to do something like this. Certainly, in one installation in my State of Oklahoma, we have 13,000 civilian employees who are going to be grandfathered in, and I want them to be grandfathered in. That is the right thing to do. People make career decisions predicated on what they are told at the time. And these military guys--and I look around the room and most of the Senators who are in here have spent a lot of time, as I have, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we talk to these guys in the mess hall, and they talk about how they happened to get in. They make these decisions, and then we come along and take it away. I think it has been said enough, the example of the gunnery sergeant at age 42, having been in for 20 years, and it is going to cost him some $72,000, but not much is said about the officers. For the officers, it is actually a lot more than that. An O-5 officer at that agency under the same circumstances would lose $124,000.…”