National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. COTTON. Mr. President, it is an honor to serve in the Senate. It is an honor to serve the people of Arkansas. I would never complain about the tasks we are given.

There is one small burden I bear, though. As a junior Senator, I preside over the Senate--I usually do it in the mornings--which means I am forced to listen to the bitter, vulgar, incoherent ramblings of the minority leader. Normally, like every other American, I ignore them. I can't ignore them today, however.

The minority leader came to the floor, grinding the Senate to a halt all week long, saying that we haven't had time to read this Defense bill; that it was written in the dead of night.

We just had a vote that passed 98 to 0. It could have passed unanimously 2 days ago. Let's examine these claims that we haven't had time to read it--98 to 0--and in committee, all the Democrats on the Armed Services Committee voted in favor of it. When was the last time the minority leader read a bill? It was probably an electricity bill.

What about the claims that it was written in the dark of night? It has been public for weeks. And this, coming from a man who drafted ObamaCare in his office and rammed it through this Senate at midnight on Christmas Eve on a straight party-line vote?

To say that the Senator from Arizona wrote this in the dead of night, slipped in all kinds of provisions, that people don't have time to read it, that is an outrageous slander. And to say he cares for the troops, how about this troop and his son and his father and his grandfather--four generations of service, to include almost 6 years of rotting in a prisoner of war camp. To say he is delaying this because he cares for the troops, a man who never served himself, a man who, in April of 2007, came to this very floor, before the surge had even reached its peak, and said the war was lost when over 100 Americans were being killed in Iraq every month, when I was carrying their dead bodies off an airplane at Dover Air Force Base--it is an outrage to say we had to delay this because he cares for the troops. We are delaying it for one reason and one reason only: to protect his own sad, sorry legacy.

He now complains in the mornings that the Senate is not in session enough, that our calendar is too short. Whatever you think about that, the happy byproduct of fewer days in session in the Senate is that this institution will be cursed less with his cancerous leadership.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source