Political Quotes

“I know that we have a lineup of speakers. We have a speaker from Hawaii who is going to be here shortly, at which time I would be very pleased to yield, but I wish to make a couple of comments. First, the fact that we are getting to this bill is great, because if you look at the last few years, we have not had a chance to do this until late in the year. The last 2 years it was December before we actually got around to it. It could have been a real crisis, because I think most of us in the Senate know that if we had gone to December 31, all kinds of things would have stopped--funding for a lot of our reenlistment bonuses and other things. I applaud the chairman for using his influence to get this bill on floor so we could go ahead and get it passed. It is something that we need to make sure the people who are out there risking their lives on a day-to-day basis know and that they know we are having this as our top priority. I want to make one comment about sequestration. People are talking about putting equal amounts of increases--not just in the military or in the defense portion but also in the other portions of government, such as the IRS and the EPA--without recognition that as we went through the funding mechanism, we were taking money out of military on a 50-50 basis with nondefense moneys, while the military is only 16 percent of the budget. So we have already started at a great disadvantage.…”