National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Peters).

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Sarbanes).

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, actually, it precisely does handcuff them by telling them how to make their decisions, saying they can't make a decision based on their belief that needs for alternatives to fossil fuels are important. If we don't wish to handcuff them, don't offer an amendment telling them that they have to spend their money in a certain way. That is exactly what this amendment does.

Again, there are multiple reasons for making these investments in alternative energy. I will return to one that was raised by Mr. Gibson.

Out in the field, you need multiple different sources of energy. If you can get a situation where you have properly developed solar power or thermal power and you can use that on the spot where you are at, instead of relying on trucks to bring in diesel or gasoline, you are saving lives.

This is an investment in making our military more prepared. What this amendment does is it restricts the ability of the Department of Defense to make that investment. If you don't want to restrict them, don't restrict them.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Ms. McCollum).

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself 3 minutes.

I speak about the broader bill. Unfortunately, something happened in the Rules Committee yesterday that has been happening far too often in recent years. This was much debated during the debate over the rule, but I didn't have a chance to come and talk about it.

There was an amendment added in committee that overturns an executive order by the President. The executive order basically says: if you discriminate against the LGBT community, you will not be allowed to get government contracts.

That executive order also had an exception for religious organizations. The amendment that was added in committee--and it is much debated as to what it did or didn't do, but my reading of it is that it dramatically expands that exception and basically increases the ability of defense firms and subcontractors to discriminate against the LGBT community.

The larger problem here is: Why couldn't we vote on it?

It puts our Members in the position of voting for a defense bill that has what we believe to be discriminatory language in it without our even having had the opportunity to have voted to remove that language.

This is something that has happened for the last 3 or 4 years on an increasing basis. It used to be that this was an open rule. With the defense bill, you basically offered an amendment; you had a debate; and you had a chance. Then we started to shrink them down a little bit. Now, in the last couple of years, anything that is inconvenient for the majority to vote on or, even more distressingly, anything that they think will make it inconvenient for us to vote on the bill gets struck.

That is not the way the Rules Committee is supposed to work. They are supposed to give us the opportunity to vote on these amendments. They, again, have narrowly crafted it down to just the amendments that they like. Having this discriminatory provision within the defense bill, in addition to all of the other problems, has forced me to the point at which I am actually going to oppose the bill, which I do not want to do and did not want to do; but I hope, in the future, the Rules Committee will at least give us a chance to vote.

We had a robust debate about the substance of this particular amendment earlier. Again, it is not so much about the substance of the particular amendment. It is about the opportunity for our Members to have a vote. If we could go on record and vote against that amendment on the floor--do our best to strip it out--then at least we are on record. Here, we are simply forced to vote for a defense bill that contains discriminatory language that we do not support.

I hope, in the future, the Rules Committee will stop doing this, will let the democratic process work, will give us the opportunity to vote, accept the outcome of that vote, and move forward.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield the gentlewoman an additional 30 seconds.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to make clear that my opposition to the bill at this point is not just based on the exclusion of the amendment that would have lifted the discrimination against the LGBT community. That was sort of the last straw.

I was on the fence about this bill from the very beginning because, understand that this bill continues the pattern of the last few years, of putting our defense on a fiscal path to nowhere, a fiscal path towards a cliff of not having the money to fund what needs to be funded because the Budget Control Act remains in place.

Now, the chairman repeatedly says that in 2008, we did this when a new administration was coming in. We only funded half of the overseas contingency operation fund, knowing the supplemental was coming.

There was no Budget Control Act in 2008. The Budget Control Act is in place. Even if we get a supplemental in April--and in this Congress, getting additional money is no guarantee--the Budget Control Act remains in place, and this Congress has shown a complete unwillingness to get rid of it.

So what we are doing by funding all of these programs that some of my colleagues have started, we are funding a defense that we cannot sustain.

I think the best example of this is the military wanted to cut the size of the Marine Corps and the Army. Now, the levels that they wanted to cut them to were levels that no one in the defense community wanted to cut them to, but that was the amount of money that they have available under the Budget Control Act.

As soon as we repeal the Budget Control Act, we will have a lot easier conversation about how to fund defense; but what we are doing to national security right now is we are creating a bow wave that they will not be able to absorb.

When the Budget Control Act kicks in again next year, all of a sudden the Army and the Marine Corps will have to, like that, cut--my numbers may be off a little bit here--30,000 in the Army, 10,000 in the Marine Corps. You can't really do that in any sort of reasonable way. It will be incredibly disruptive to the military, incredibly disruptive to readiness.

Now, I will agree with the chairman that a passionate case can be made for spending more on defense. Heck, if we spent a trillion dollars on defense, a passionate case could be made for spending even more than that when you look at the threat environment. But we have the money we have.

He also cited that, in 2010 numbers, we are now 23 percent below where we are at, and that is true. But we are 23 percent below where we are at because of the 2011 Budget Control Act which, again, this House refuses to repeal.

So instead of dealing with the amount of money that Congress has forced the Department of Defense to deal with, we fantasize that more money will appear, and in that fantasy, we put the military in an impossible situation.

We start all of these programs. There is not the money to finish those programs. And maybe someone can tell me where this money is going to come from, how it is going to magically appear, when we are $19 trillion in debt--I forget off the top of my head what the deficit is this year, but it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 or $600 billion--deficits for as far as the eye can see; the Freedom Caucus on the Republican side refusing to spend any more money.

This money is not going to appear. And so what we are going to have is we are going to have a military that has to cut drastically and irresponsibly in the blink of an eye because we refused to let them do it responsibly.

I would urge Members to read Secretary Carter's testimony before the Senate earlier this week or last week where he outlined what a devastating impact this defense bill will have on our national security when the bills that it is charging actually come due.

Now, that is the primary reason to oppose this bill; contemplating swallowing that and hoping that, like last year, we could fix that in conference.

But in addition to that, to have discriminatory provisions in it brings me back to 2009, when the Republicans opposed the defense bill because it had an antihate crime piece of legislation attached to it.

There are reasons to oppose the defense bill other than you just don't really like people who serve in the military, and that is a condescending and irresponsible argument to make against those who would oppose the bill.

If we continue down this funding path, we are not serving the military. All of these readiness disasters that we keep hearing about have, in part, happened because of the way this committee and the Appropriations Committee has funded defense for the last 3 or 4 years, by taking from readiness to fund a wide variety of programs, including the beginning of the $1 trillion Mr. Blumenauer talked about for our nuclear deterrent.

We are not making choices. We refuse to get rid of the A-10. We refuse to lay off 11 cruisers. We refuse to allow the military to shrink its size and, instead, we keep putting it on a credit card and hoping that the money will appear.

Well, when that money doesn't appear--and it is not going to. I haven't seen money just sort of burst out of nowhere in my lifetime. Maybe we will be lucky and maybe it will be the first time--but it puts the Department of Defense in a tenuous position.

We need to start making choices based on the money that we actually have. This bill doesn't do that.

Six months from now, our troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq will have no money, and we hope that problem fixes itself. That is a national security reason for opposing this bill.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, this is clearly a problem that we need to work on. The chairman and I have worked together in talking about it and making sure that our military assets are protected as we deal with spectrum auctions.

I look forward to having the conversation in conference committee about how to deal with this, but my concern is this is something that many on the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and I as well, have worked on for a number of years. We worked with the Department of Defense for years to try and make sure that their equities were protected. We talked with everyone we could conceivably talk with. This auction was originally set up to make sure that we protected those.

Now we are hearing a slightly new argument. I certainly want to make sure that the Department of Defense's interests are protected, but I also want to make sure that they don't have absolute veto power on auctioning spectrum. That was sort of the law before all of the Committee on Energy and Commerce and others worked on, and it really tied up a very valuable national asset, as Mr. Pallone points out.

I hope that as we get into conference committee we will figure out how to both protect the interests of national security and the Defense, but also make sure that, if spectrum can be safely made available, it is safely made available.

As I said, this was something that was worked on for a very long time, and we thought we had it worked out. So right at the eleventh hour here, to have the Department of Defense say ``No, we want to change it'' is something I think we still need to examine more closely.

I thank Mr. Pallone for the time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I just want to say quickly, in the en bloc package, there was an amendment that was put in there having to do with our development of a new rocket engine and a new launch vehicle. I just want to thank publicly Mr. Rogers, the subcommittee chairman, who worked very closely with me on developing this language.

We have got a lot of great things going on out there. There are a lot of American companies that are working hard to develop a new engine so we will no longer have to rely on the Russian engine.

The amendment that was included allows those companies to use some of the money that the Air Force is providing for the development of a new engine, to use it also to develop a launch vehicle to go along with that engine. We have got, like I said, great companies like Blue Origin in my district, Aerojet Rocketdyne--a lot of folks working on new vehicles--SpaceX as well. This amendment allows the money that the Air Force is providing not just to go to the engine but for some of it to go to a launch vehicle as well. I think this will greatly reduce the cost of our launch costs for the Air Force, which has been a significantly problem recently.

So I thank Chairman Rogers for allowing us to offer that amendment and for working with me on it.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I urge adoption of the en bloc amendments.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 4 minutes.

I just want to thank the chairman, and I want to thank the staff and the Members for putting together this piece of legislation. It is always a long process but I think a good process, in which we pull together a variety of different amendments. And, as the chairman has said many times, it is a bottom-up process. It starts with the Members offering their ideas in putting together the bill. I think, once again, we have done that process fairly well.

The problem and the challenge, as I had mentioned earlier, comes from the budget number and the problems that we face. I know the chairman has said earlier, you know, we can't solve all these problems; so let's help the troops now.

The problem is, it is like you have got a credit card and you say: wow, off in the future there may be problems, but let's just buy whatever we want, put it on the credit card now, and that will help everybody in the long run. But it doesn't. It is not helping the troops to pass a bill that has 6 months worth of funding for a yearlong's worth of overseas contingency operations, and it is not helping them to hope that the Budget Control Act goes away.

The chairman mentioned that last year we had this same problem and we did wind up getting an agreement, and that is true. Part of the reason we got that agreement, however, is because we, on this side, insisted on that agreement and did not merely accept the defense bill that was offered without resolving those issues.

And, once again, we have to insist upon that: that it does not make sense to have the Budget Control Act and continue to insist on spending more money on defense. Essentially, what the majority party wants is they want a Ferrari, but they only want to provide the money to pay for a Honda, and they keep hoping that somehow that extra money is going to appear. That hurts our troops.

We have heard all of these stories about the terrible state of our readiness. Consistently, over the course of the last 4 years, the bill that has been passed in the House and the Senate has put less money into readiness than the President asked for. Why? Because they wanted to pay for a wide variety of programs, including the A-10, an important plane, we have heard.

I am not saying that there is anything in this bill that you can't make an argument for as being important. The problem is it doesn't add up, and it leaves us in a position where the military is continually having to stare at a cliff, knowing that the money is not going to be there and trying to figure out how to plan through that.

I want a more sensible process. We should fully fund the OCO and fund the base budget at the level that it is funded at. If we don't find that sufficient--and I know just about every member of the Armed Services Committee on the Republican side does not find that number sufficient--then provide the money. This isn't a matter of saying, well, what has that got to do with this? That has got everything to do with this.

If you are not willing to provide the money to pay for these programs, starting them, or telling the military that they have to have a fixed number of members of the Army and the Marine Corps, and then knowing that the money isn't going to be there a year from now, is not helpful. We have to bring some sanity to the budget process. This bill, artfully, just imagines that 6 months from now, we will magically make up the extra money in OCO. That is a big problem that, once again, we need to confront.

But just like last year, I am confident that we will come together in conference, we will talk about this, we will work it out, and we will come up with a bill. But I hope that we will start understanding the money a little bit better and making this actually work so that the bill we pass is helping the men and women of the armed services who serve us so well.

So it is not about whether or not you support the troops or not; it is a matter of whether or not you think this bill is the best way to do it.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Lipinski).
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time just to, again, emphasize that this is a very, very important piece of legislation, and it is important that we get it right. This is one step in the process.

At the committee level, we worked together and got the bill out. At the time, I raised the concerns that I am raising now. I voted in favor of the bill, hoping that we would make improvements on the floor. Instead, we went the other way.

We had one amendment that was supported in the committee that the Rules Committee stripped without allowing a vote, a rule that would have women sign up for the Selective Service, an amendment that was supported by my caucus. The Rules Committee didn't even allow us to have a vote on that. They just stripped it.

On another one, on the amendment that we didn't like that was in the bill, they went the other way and didn't allow a vote on that to keep it in place. That is not a fair process.

I will say that there are ultimately two objections to this bill and preface it with one thing. I think the chairman in committee has been very, very fair, has worked very well with Democrats, and I do appreciate that. The Rules Committee, on the other hand, has been the exact opposite. They have been completely and totally partisan in a way that is not in keeping with the tradition of the Armed Services Committee and the way we do business in a fair way: to allow members to have votes on amendments that are important to them. They didn't do that, and that made this bill even worse than it was when it came out of committee. I hope the Rules Committee will do better in the future. I don't think that is likely, but that is certainly one issue.

The second issue is, again, the funding. If we are really going to provide for the troops, we have to realistically look at the next 10 years and begin building a national security strategy that can support them, based on the budget that we are prepared to provide. There is no new revenue coming. Even if the budget caps go away, typically the way the budget caps go away is they are extended for another year, and basically we use 10-year money to pay for 1 year's worth of goods and services, which only puts us in a further hole.

Lastly, I will point out those other portions of the budget. The defense budget has grown as a proportion of the discretionary budget. It is now over 55 percent of it.

Essentially, what the Republican party is trying to do is to spend all of the money on defense, and then there will be nothing left over for the other priorities. Those other priorities do matter, and it is wrong to ask: Well, what has the defense bill got to do with our crumbling infrastructure? What has the defense bill got to do with long lines at the TSA or at Homeland Security or at the Department of Justice or anywhere else?

It has got everything to do with it in a year when we don't have a budget resolution, so we don't have set amounts of money for each bill. Every dollar that we put into this is taking out of the overall allocation and is taking from all of those other priorities.

Yes, national security is incredibly important, but I think infrastructure is important as well. I think the Department of Homeland Security is important, as is the Department of Justice, as is the Department of the Treasury, which tries to stop terrorists from raising money. What we are doing here is refusing to pass a budget resolution, to put the numbers in place, and then spending all of the money on defense first--sorry. It is an exaggeration as it is not all of the money but more of the money than was agreed upon--and then what is left over goes to everything else. That is not a responsible way to budget. That is not a responsible way to provide for this country.

For those reasons, I am going to oppose the bill. I hope, again, as we did last year, we will work this out in conference, come up with a more sensible approach, and have a bill that we can all support.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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