Political Quotes

“I rise to comment, along with my colleague Senator Durbin, about the Sanders amendment. I must commend how thoughtful and knowledgeable Senator Durbin is about all these subjects. He has pointed out how there are too many military programs that are not well moderated and that have cost overruns that result in excess cost to the American public. We have to do something about those things, and we also understand that we have huge demand with respect to nondefense spending that we have to meet also. The Sanders amendment, as Senator Durbin pointed out, would impose an across-the-board cut to the Department of Defense, except for military personnel accounts and the defense health programs. What he would call a 10-percent across-the-board cut, when you take out health and personnel, becomes really a 14-percent cut to all the accounts at the Department of Defense. The danger, as so well illustrated by Senator Durbin, is that this type of indiscriminate getting rid of the good and paying for the bad that doesn't really work. It doesn't make sense. It reminds us all of the battles we had over sequestration, where Departments--not only the Department of Defense but the civilian Departments--had to fund programs because they met the cap and then cut other programs that were much more valuable because they exceeded the cap. That is not a way, as they proverbially say, to run a railroad, nor the Department of Defense.…”