John Cornyn: “in the debate on the competing amendments, the Collins-Lieberman amendment and the Cornyn-Feinstein amendment, before I…”

“in the debate on the competing amendments, the Collins-Lieberman amendment and the Cornyn-Feinstein amendment, before I get into the body of my remarks, I want to address some criticism that was lodged at the Cornyn-Feinstein amendment. I believe reference was made to the amendment as being ``cobbled together.'' I point out to my colleagues that the amendment of Senator Feinstein and myself was not a cobbled-together proposal. Our work was based on work already done in the House of Representatives and in this body as well. We have also worked with a number of cities and States. In fact, our language is precisely the same, or I should say based on Congressman Chris Cox's legislation, H.R. 1544, which passed in the House 409 to 10, hardly indicative of an amendment that was cobbled together. The question really is, Who should make the decision on how to allocate homeland security dollars? There has been a lot of discussion about how much money should be distributed as a minimum amount and how much should be distributed based on risk. I ask my colleagues to consider in this war on terror who should make the decisions on how best to allocate resources. Should Congress divvy up the pie and decide to distribute money based on how many pieces of pie ought to be cut up, or should those who have access to the intelligence, who know about risk and how best to allocate our resources to address that risk be the ones to make that distribution?…”