Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise in support of the work Chairwoman Mikulski and Ranking Member Shelby and the Appropriations Committee have done and the place they will bring us to on the floor of the Senate this week as we take an important step forward to fix the fiscal year 2013 budget. I will be meeting tomorrow--as many legislators do during the course of the year--with my Governor. All of the Virginia delegation will be sitting down with Governor McDonnell, who will be visiting, and he and the State will view this as very good news as we can talk about this work product. I made my first speech on the floor about 2 weeks ago, and it was a speech that was kind of a plea. It was a plea to avoid the economic self-inflicted wound of sequester. As we all know, we were not able to do that at the time. There were two bills, and neither of them was able to get sufficient votes to move forward. The negative consequences from that sequester have been felt in the Commonwealth, as I traveled around, whether it is warn notices to ship repairers in the Hampton Roads area, planned furloughs of DOD civilian employees, or a delay in a carrier deployment that could potentially leave us more vulnerable in the Middle East. The good news is that we can fix it and improve it. The Appropriations Committee's work discussed today is a way to begin to do that.…”