Political Quotes

“I yield myself 3 minutes. This is a very straightforward amendment that simply asks the President to put together a plan to close Guantanamo Bay. One of the complaints in recent weeks is that we've seen Guantanamo become more and more untenable. It continues to be an international eyesore. Way back in 2007, President George W. Bush said it should be closed. Then-candidate John McCain said it should be closed. As recently as last week, Senator McCain and some other Senators went down and reached that conclusion as well. I think a justifiable criticism of that has come from the other side of the aisle that said, well, you can't close it unless you've got a plan for what to do with the inmates and a plan for how to close it, and that is exactly what this amendment does. It requires the President within 60 days to come up with a plan for closing Guantanamo Bay prison, and then it also removes all of the restrictions that are in this bill that would stop him from generating that plan. The bottom line is that we do not need Guantanamo. Guantanamo was set up in the first place in the hopes that, because it wasn't actually on American soil, we could somehow hold people outside the normal bounds of due process and the Constitution, but the Court ruled otherwise. The Court ruled that habeas does apply because Guantanamo is effectively under the control of the United States. So there is no benefit there. There are no greater rights in the U.S. than there are in Guantanamo.…”