Political Quotes

“Madam President, one, I would like to compliment Senator Burr for trying to find a way to improve veterans health care. I think the comment he made is pretty accurate. Before you expand a system that is clearly broken, it looks to me like you would want to fix it. There is a bipartisan view that it is broken. A lot of solutions have bipartisan support. But we are where we are. I know Senator Sanders is very genuine about wanting to expand veterans' benefits. I certainly understand where Senator Burr is coming from. We want to, one, pay for whatever we do, because we are $17 trillion in debt. But, two, we have to look at the broken system. If you include another 14 million veterans, people who are not service connected and make them overnight eligible for VA health care that is in short supply, you will frustrate the ones who need it the most and take a weak system and completely break it. It seems to me that is not helping veterans at all. But part of the package that Senator Burr has authored also deals with another problem of great and immediate concern: imposing sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program if the negotiations fail to deliver the desired result. This is an unfortunate moment for me. Senators Menendez and Kirk have been a team for a long time working to impose sanctions on the Iranian government as they march toward a nuclear weapon. We have imposed 16 rounds of sanctions since 1987; 9 U.N.…”