Political Quotes

“Mr. President, there have been a lot of discussions over the last few days about a bill--a bill many months in the making; a bill that has been discussed, debated, and drafted, largely in secret. We saw it for the first time Sunday evening, at 7 p.m. eastern time. That bill has a lot of material in it. As it was released to us Sunday night, it spent somewhere just shy of $120 billion. Since then, it has gone through some changes. It now spends just a little under $100 billion, about $95 billion. And it has been modified. Its scope has been narrowed. I want to talk, first, just for a few minutes about how we got here or where we are in that process and then about some concerns I have with the bill as it now stands. Last fall--the fall of 2023--there was a push spearheaded primarily by the White House but a push that included most Senate Democrats and some Senate Republicans--a push to get more aid to Ukraine. Now, remember, the total aid the United States has spent on Ukraine throughout the duration of this conflict is somewhere in the neighborhood of $113, $114 billion. It is an enormous amount of money. The military aid component of that itself--at least until fairly recently--was more than the military aid provided by any other country or any other group of countries. It is an enormous sum of money.…”