Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am fully aware that we are not going to be able to get past a unanimous consent request, but I wanted to make sure the Chair knew and others know that we have an amendment that I will do the best I can to bring out. It is an amendment that already has 21 cosponsors. There is a provision in the Senate bill that was put in by the Senate that is not in the House bill that has to do with commissaries. It is viewed upon as privatizing commissaries. It is not really that. It is an attempt to evaluate the idea of the commissaries being privatized by using five commissaries as test cells to see what kind of result we would get if we did privatize them. What we are doing with my amendment is taking it back--taking that language out--in order to go ahead with an assessment before we do that. It wouldn't make sense to me that if we wanted to get this done, even if we felt very passionately about privatizing, that we would do it before we had an assessment. So the assessment would be first. We had a lot of discussion about this in the Senate Armed Services Committee. As I said, we now have 21 cosponsors who would like to reverse this so we can do the assessment and then make the determination. It is kind of interesting, even though most people say privatizing is not going to actually save or make any money, the amendment simply requires the assessment on privatizing before we make any significant changes to our servicemembers' privatized commissary benefits.…”