Joe Cunningham: “I have served on two committees that I thought were probably the most bipartisan committees in this body. One of those…”

“I have served on two committees that I thought were probably the most bipartisan committees in this body. One of those is one of the committees that we did away with under Chairman Jones and Chairman Studds, the Committee on the Merchant Marine and Fisheries, in which the two groups, the two different parties came together and I think fought for what was important to the American people. The second of those committees is the Committee on National Security. Even though the previous chairman, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums] and I have disagreed on issues, he has always been fair, except maybe on one small area that we had some conflict on. But I think the reason for that is that the members of that committee are there to help the men and women that we support, and I think that is why we passed this bill out 46 to 3. I do not know of very many committees that you could get that kind of support on both sides of the aisle to do. Another area, the night we had the resolution on Bosnia, I said, please, the resolutions basically in my opinion did not mean very much. What to follow is as far as how we support the troops. How do we do that? We do it with training so that they have the skills to use the equipment that we want to give them, which is better equipment than what they could potentially face. Even more important than that, if you go off to war, you want to know that your family is taken care of. Those are important.”