Political Quotes

“let me tell my colleagues the practical problems we have with the legislation which we face. Many, many times we have lost $1 billion in the defense bill, and our defense bill is $288 billion this year. But when we lose it on the House side, if somebody offered an amendment on one, say it was the F-22 and the Senate had a different figure, we would go into the conference and have a very difficult time resolving it. We would lose our flexibility. There is no easy way to reduce the deficit. It can only be done with very difficult decisions. In defense, we figure we are $15 billion to $20 billion short. So if we took out this kind of money, it would actually affect national defense in a very derogatory way. I would hope the Members would understand the importance of this vote. This is absolutely essential to our flexibility in dealing with the other body, so that if something is cut in the House, we can go back and renegotiate and hopefully be able to either restore something or, in the end, get the Department to pay attention to what we are telling them to do. Last year we cut the F-22. We said we needed more testing. We cut a lot of money out of it. If we had not had this flexibility, this program would have been killed. I would urge the Members to reconsider the vote on this particular amendment.”