Jim Webb: “I wish to thank my colleague from Oklahoma for giving me the courtesy of speaking, and I thank him again for the work he…”

“I wish to thank my colleague from Oklahoma for giving me the courtesy of speaking, and I thank him again for the work he has done on the Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on East Asian Affairs, where he is the ranking Republican, and the other work he has done on the Armed Services Committee. Today I rise to speak about the National Criminal Justice Commission legislation which I introduced more than 2 years ago and which the leader and the managers of this bill are now going to offer as an amendment to the pending legislation. First of all, I thank the leader and the managers of the bill for calling up this legislation. I also thank my principal Republican cosponsor, Senator Lindsey Graham, for all the work he has done. There are good national commissions and bad national commissions and redundant national commissions and sometimes there are national commissions which are not only needed but vital to the resolution of issues we face. I am thinking, as I speak, of the first Commission on Wartime Contracting which Senator Claire McCaskill and I introduced 4 years ago and which resulted in a finding of approximately $30 billion in fraud, waste, and abuse in contracts that had gone to Iraq and Afghanistan and which provided a model for the way we should be approaching such contracts in the future. I would put this particular national commission in that category. It was put together after much thought and many hearings.…”