Political Quotes

“this amendment, I think, is a splendid bipartisan effort on the part of the Senator from Connecticut [Mr. Dodd] and the Senator from Vermont [Mr. Jeffords] to do something about the urgent problem of education in this country today. The Dodd-Jeffords amendment will add $30.5 billion to function 500 for education and it cuts $9.5 billion from function 050, the defense function of the budget. The amendment also spends some of the money from the Exon-Grassley amendment, but what finer way to do it. This amendment shifts Federal dollars from the military side to the education side. As we have heard earlier, what it does, it cancels what is essentially, in my view, a cold war relic--Milstar. It takes a bite out of the enormous Intelligence Committee budget. It is an amazing thing to me that, even with the cold war over, the intelligence budget is still funded at essentially the same level it was before the collapse of the Soviet Union; and this in the face of statements made by the leaders of the intelligence community in this country that at least 60 percent of their budget went to either gather intelligence against the old Soviet Union or to counteract intelligence efforts of the old Soviet Union. And even though the old Soviet Union is no longer there, according to public accounts, we are still spending in the neighborhood of $30 billion for intelligence.…”