Political Quotes

“I was just down to Fort Campbell and saw the real property maintenance problems they are having. I talked to the wives of some of the people down at Fort Campbell, and they were telling me how they were having trouble getting access to medical care. These are just small examples of my growing concern about military readiness. I am starting to see some frays in military readiness, and I think it is because our defense cuts have put us on the very edge. We still have a high level of deployments around the world. Our military people are deployed--I think they said 50 percent of the time and that must be paid for. We have cut $150 billion from Defense in 15 years. It's the only major part of the budget that has taken sizable cuts. We have reduced it to the point where we cannot reduce it any more. Now let me just tell my colleagues the facts and how the budget allocation process works. We have 13 subcommittee chairmen on the Committee on Appropriations who will sit down after this budget resolution is finished. They will make a decision and a recommendation to the Democratic caucus of the committee and then to the full Committee on Appropriations--a recommendation about how the money in the budget resolution is going to be spent among the 13 appropriations subcommittees.”