Political Quotes

“Mr. President, let me thank the chairman of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to have this colloquy because something has happened that shouldn't have happened. It happened over on the House side, and we had no control over it. While I support and will vote for the fiscal year 2012 Defense authorization bill, this is the third year in a row we have bypassed the formal conference process. I am pleased we finished the bill, but this broken process allows for abuse, and we have certainly had some abuse that I will allude to here. If the proper procedure had been followed, some of these problems would not have happened. On December 3, the House Armed Services Committee staff inserted new language into the conference that would impact how DOD maintains its ships, maintains its aircraft, maintains its ground vehicles--private and public--impacting thousands of jobs in a number of States. That was December 3. It wasn't until the morning of December 7 that I, along with several other Senators, were shown the new language. That was just 6\1/2\ hours before we were to have our first conference. We were going to be asked to support the new language without a full vetting from the concerned Members' offices or from the depots and shipyards, arsenals, the Shipbuilders Council of America, the Virginia Ship Repair Association, and all of the rest of these stakeholders and those who were concerned. That was November 7.…”