Political Quotes

“as Senator Kyl and I discussed earlier, this is an attempt to try to find an offset to basically increase the cap for this appropriations bill by finding an offset of a little over $200 million so we could fully fund the border security request from the President, from the Department of Homeland Security, for 2,500 border guards and increase the detention facilities to the amount that the President requested in his budget. This amount comes from a provision that lifts the cap on the number of reverse mortgages that will be available to our seniors to help them provide for themselves where they have a high amount of equity in their homes and not a sufficient stream of income. So what this legislation would do is provide that initial income by allowing more reverse mortgages to be authorized from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Unfortunately, we did understand this is subject to a point of germaneness, but this is good public policy, and it has bipartisan support. It happens to come up with basically the amount of money that we needed to provide for both fully funding border guards and fully funding detention facilities. So my hope was that--as is the case in many appropriations bills--we set aside the issue of germaneness, and we deal with the substantive issue, which is this is good public policy and it accomplishes another good public policy, which is to provide for the border guards.…”