Political Quotes

“This amendment is pretty simple. It says that we are not going to use any funds at this particular time to propose, plan, or execute any additional Base Realignment and Closure rounds, better known as BRAC, the reason being that this language was adopted in the National Defense Authorization Act by an overwhelming vote of 325-98. The House has spoken and has said now is not the time to use these funds to begin this. I want to make sure that people understand that this is also in the Senate language. I want to make sure people understand, too, that this is a process by which we want to make sure we are understanding how decisionmaking takes place. A force structure comes before decisions on infrastructure, and as you know, the service branches are still making the decision about what the end strength should be--how many people we should have in our military. That will determine what our infrastructure should be. We are also undergoing an overseas base and housing assessment to determine what our presence should be overseas. That is ongoing. That should be completed before we even entertain any consideration about what our base structure needs to be here at home. The cost estimates for the last Base Realignment and Closure Commission in 2005 indicated that it would cost $21 billion. Now we see it costs $35 billion.…”