Political Quotes

“I agree with the chairman we should adopt the en bloc amendments. I did want to take a moment here--we don't have any speakers on this--to make a couple comments about some Rules Committee decisions that I have not had a chance to speak about before. Overall, I applaud the product that we have crated here in a bipartisan way. I thank the chairman for doing that. I do think it is a fortunate the Rules Committee ruled out of order a number of amendments. Two of them were mine. One was to offer a BRAC amendment to give Members of Congress a chance to vote on it. The other was to offer up the administration's proposal to lay up 14 Navy vessels as an effort to save money. There are several problems with the fact that these amendments were ruled out of order, and the biggest one is one of the arguments that I have made of concern about this bill from the very beginning, because even though I support the product and there are a lot of very good things in this bill, I think the weakness of it and the thing that we are going have to confront when we go to conference is the fact that it delays every single difficult decision. During the debate and during general debate yesterday, a couple of people commented that they liked the bill for a variety of different reasons and said that it made some tough choices. I asked a couple of times to name one. I don't believe we did make a tough choice.…”