Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, the point, as my colleague from Indiana was making, was what the public has a right to know. The fiscal year 1997 budget was revealed to the American public as $26.6 billion. That was not something that was probably a shock to our adversaries, who have pretty good estimates of what we are doing in this arena. There are experts that speculate on this. The Republic's foundations have not been shattered. The next year when it was revealed that it was $26.7 billion, life went on, and if we were to give the American public what the figure is for this year and what is recommended in the aggregate for the following year, life as we know it will continue. I think that we in this body and in the Federal Government generally tend to draw a curtain of secrecy over things that are not going to be secret from our adversaries; but they are going to keep, and this happens time and time again, information that we do not want revealed to the American public for whatever reason. We are starting to see the history of what has happened with the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover under the guise of national security.”