Political Quotes

“By way of historical context, I would like to point out the following: There is an unbroken record for the last 45 years of Senate history that the Senate has passed an annual Defense authorization bill. The Senate and House have come to a conference agreement on and the President has signed that conference into law as the National Defense Authorization Act. Only once before has the chairman of the Armed Services Committee had to resort to the rare parliamentary procedure of proposing that that bill, the entire Defense authorization bill, be placed upon another legislative matter. That was in the year 1988. Time is short. We must be reasonable in the amount of time we have been debating both the authorization bill and the appropriations bill. I ask for my colleagues' consideration and restraint in offering amendments to the appropriations bill, as well as to the authorization bill, hopefully, to achieve the unanimous consent agreement, which I hope will be offered in the next few days, to enable the authorization bill to become a freestanding bill with a designated number of amendments, with designated time agreements, and a clear estimate for both the Republican and Democratic leaders as to the number of days that would be required for completion. That will all be set forth, hopefully, in the next few days in a UC request. We must be aware of the importance of the measure, the authorization bill.…”