Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, first of all, I want to add my congratulations to our chairman, Ike Skelton, for his outstanding service to this Congress and more than anything for his outstanding service to our troops. Anyone who has worked with Ike, anyone who has worked on this committee, knows that that is always his first priority, the men and women who serve in our military, and they could not possibly have had a better advocate through his years on the Armed Services Committee. He will be missed. Once again, he has done his job and done it well. Every year he has made sure that we get a defense authorization bill passed, and it has not always been easy. Certainly it was not easy this year. But he got it done, I should say with the able assistance of the ranking member, soon to be chairman, Buck McKeon. That is one thing we agree on in a bipartisan way: We get this bill done. It is always important. It is especially important when we have troops in harm's way in Afghanistan and Iraq to get the authorizing bill done, to make sure that we give our troops and the militarily the support that it deserves. Now, I will disagree on the process. It is wrong and just not factual to blame the House leadership for the process that we have today. We got our job done. We did it. We passed the bill. The Senate didn't act on it. The only alternative we had was to put this slimmed down bill up today or have no bill at all, which we all agree is not acceptable.…”