Political Quotes

“I ask to speak on leader time. We will in a very few minutes be coming to a vote on the question of germaneness on the Warner amendment. I want to take a few minutes to comment on two issues. One is what we have been talking about over the last 30 or 45 minutes; that is, the Defense authorization bill. And secondly, I want to make a quick comment on the germaneness issue. We heard the distinguished Senator from West Virginia argue very strongly to have a freestanding Defense authorization bill come to the floor, and that is the most appropriate way to handle that bill. I agree to that. In fact, we have tried to do that in the past. We spent about 4 days on the floor, and at that time, because we had well over 100 amendments, took it off the floor to be addressed at some point in the future. We heard from the Senator from Michigan saying the only way that we believe we can deal with this is by offering it as an amendment, which has been done to the appropriations bill. I want to make it very clear I disagree with that. First, Defense appropriations: I think the appropriate way of dealing with this very important bill is to have it as a freestanding piece of legislation. As I mentioned, we have attempted to do that in the past, and I have been trying very hard to do that over the last couple of weeks.…”