Political Quotes

“I have a problem here with the 16-hour delay. This supplemental has been sitting here for 2 months, and we got it up, and we complain about 16 hours' delay? The thing that worries me as much as anything is we have a shortfall on the National Guard of $1.8 billion. We have those National Guard deployed. We have 78,000 National Guard deployed throughout the country, National Guard and Reserve. We have taken the money out of that. The committee put it back in. The chairman of the committee could only squeeze back in $800 million. We are now short almost $1 billion for the National Guard. I am talking about the bill actually says we have to cut people on active duty by 14,000 people in order to make up for the shortfall. Now, we say, okay, we are only talking here, or we are finagling around here in order to get through so we have enough money. But it sends a terrible signal to the troops that we do not have confidence and we are going to cut. In other words, when we vote for this rule, we have eliminated $800 million. We have not funded, I should say, $1.8 billion to take care of people who are on active duty. The National Guard called and they were bananas about the fact that we were cutting the National Guard by $1.8 billion. We did the best we could do, and we put half the money back in. I am sure between the chairman, the ranking member, the chairmen of both committees, the ranking members, we will get that money back.”