Political Quotes

“Right. So all of these factors have caused us to be put into an environment where we cannot meet the needs of our military. That has resulted in a decline of morale. That has resulted in problems in terms of funding. I have been with base commanders who have not paid their electric bill for 8 months because they have had to shift money over to help the administration pay for deployments that they never budgeted for. All of this we have to deal with. Now, for the past 2 years, the Republicans, supported by a significant number of Democrats who are our friends, this is a bipartisan debate in the Congress, the battle here is not Republicans versus Democrats. The battle here is this Congress versus a White House that is totally insensitive, in my opinion, to the military needs. We increased funding for defense for the past 2 years. What did the administration do? They soundly and roundly criticized us. They said this money was going for what they called pork barrel programs, even though 98 percent of what we funded were requests by the services. But what really offended me was former Secretary Perry coming in before our committee and testifying that they had stopped the cuts in the acquisition accounts. In effect, what he was doing was taking credit for the plus-ups that they had criticized us for putting in the year before.”