Conference Report on S. 2943, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017

Floor Speech

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

First of all, I want to say that this is an excellent product. It was not easy to pull together. It is a very large bill with a lot of very important issues. As Chairman Thornberry indicated, a lot of people contributed to it. Certainly, everybody on our committee, but then many Members who aren't on the committee in the House and, of course, our friends in the Senate. We all worked together and found a way to get through the areas of disagreement and to get to a very good bill, with the central thought that it is our job in passing this bill to give the men and women who serve us in the Armed Services all of the tools they need to do the job we ask them to do.

So I really want to echo Chairman Thornberry's comments and thank our staff, first of all, for the outstanding work that they have done in putting together this product. I thank the Members for their contribution. Also, perhaps most importantly, I thank Mr. Thornberry for his leadership as the chairman of the committee.

I have been on this committee for 20 years, and we have had a tradition from the moment I showed up and before then that this is a bipartisan committee that is focused on getting its work done. Whatever the hurdles, whatever the difficulties, whatever the disagreements, we know how important it is to produce this bill and how important it is to our troops who are fighting to protect us and provide the national security that we need.

Mr. Thornberry has upheld that tradition. We have had many chairmen in those 20 years. They have all had that first and foremost in mind.

This is not a partisan committee. This is a committee that works together to get its job done. Mr. Thornberry has done an outstanding job of that. He has certainly been an excellent partner for me, and we even found a way to work with the Senate and then made that work. So I thank all of those people who contributed to this.

Chairman Thornberry is also right. I think that the most striking thing about this bill is how much it does to help reform the way things are done at the Department of Defense. There is much on acquisition reform, all aimed at trying to get the taxpayers more for the money they spent. Because the chairman is right, as in many areas of government, there are more needs than there is money.

What we have to do is try to figure out how to make that money go as far as possible. Acquisition reform is a key part of that. We really struggled in the early part of the 21st century with a lot of programs that went overbudget. We are still dealing with the legacy of some of that, but very proud that, in the last few years, that has declined, as we have passed acquisition reform, and as we have figured out better ways to get things in the field, into service more quickly, commercial, off-the-shelf technology, more improvements in our acquisition. That is critical if we are going to be able to use the scarce resources we have to the best of our ability. So we put together an excellent product.

Also, as Chairman Thornberry mentioned, we do have the full pay raise for the troops that they need and desperately deserve. I will just close by saying, I think, that is the thing that you can really see from this bill. It prioritizes the men and women who serve in the military to try to make sure that we provide for them, give them all the training they need and all the support they need so that when we ask them to do something, they are trained and ready to do it. I really believe that is the most important thing that we do on this committee.

We can have many, many debates about what our national security strategy should be, where we should employ our forces, how we should use them, and what equipment we should provide for them. But the one thing that we have to agree on is, whatever we decide the mission should be, we have to make absolutely certain that we provide the men and women everything they need to be ready to carry out that mission so that we do not send them into a fight unprepared. I think we are doing a very good job of that.

There are many challenges ahead, as the chairman noted. We have a lot of demands. We do not have an infinite amount of money. So we are going to keep working hard to try to figure out how to make that money go as far as possible.

Again, I want to thank all the people who worked on this process.

This, I think, is an example of how Congress should work, how legislation should work, people working together, having differences, working them out, and producing a product that improves our Nation and, in this case, improves the quality of national security.

Again, I thank Chairman Thornberry. I think this is an excellent bill. I urge passage.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

I just want to make three issues, and some of them were raised during the course of the debate. First of all, I like a lot of what is in this bill. I think it is also important what is not in this bill. There were a number of issues that were extraneous to the actual business of national security that had been put in by one side or the other that, in conference, we were able to remove. One of the most prominent ones was one that was raised earlier, the so-called Russell amendment having to do with the ability of companies and businesses that are receiving government contracts to discriminate. I was very much opposed to the Russell amendment. I am happy that we agreed to take it out.

I just want to explain a little bit exactly what it is because it is really rather simple. All the President accomplished in this is that there already is an executive order saying: if you do business with the Federal Government, then you cannot discriminate against certain classes of people. I don't remember all the different classes, but certainly one of the big ones is you can't discriminate based on race. So in other words, if your religious tenets are racist--say, for instance, you don't like Black people and don't employ them and don't want to do business with them--we, as the Federal Government, have decided that that is not acceptable, and we will not allow you to do business with the Federal Government.

All this executive order did was add the LGBT community to those protected classes. So, basically, what we are saying is: not only is it not acceptable to be racist, but it is also not acceptable to be homophobic. I completely agree with that, and I would hope our country would get to the place where it would agree with that as well; that if you feel that you must discriminate against people simply based on their sexual preference, then we are not going to do business with you.

That is a policy that, I think, we should have. That is what the executive order does.

To reverse that in the Defense bill, I think, would be an abomination, particularly since we have made such progress within the Department of Defense. We have finally gotten rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell so that gay and lesbian people can serve openly in the military.

They have served in the military for decades, and now they are allowed to serve openly. We have recently allowed transgender people to serve openly as well, which I think is a tremendous step forward. The Russell amendment would take us back.

So, again, I really want to emphasize that all the executive order does is say that it is not all right to be racist and it is also not all right to be homophobic. I think that is a principle that we should stand for as a country.

I want to further add that even within that executive order, there are many exceptions that already exist. Now, even though I am a lawyer, and even though lawyers have tried to explain this to me, I don't fully understand all those exceptions, but religious groups are allowed to discriminate based on the tenets of their belief within the existing executive order that was already passed. So even though the people who were pushing the Russell amendment already have what they want--even though, in my opinion, they shouldn't--there is no need to further emphasize the fact that we are going to allow people who do contract with the Federal Government to discriminate against the LGBT community.

I think that is basically wrong and should not be allowed.

The second point I want to make is on the money. We have heard over and over again about how underfunded everything is, and I get that. But we are spending $619 billion on the Department of Defense--far and away more money than any other country in the world, and we have been spending more money on defense for decades than any other country in the world. We ought to be able to build a military that can protect our national security interests for that amount of money, and not only should we be able to, we are going to have to because we are $19 trillion in debt. I forget exactly what the deficit is this year, but it is somewhere in the $500- to $600-billion range.

We have a President coming into office who is promising trillions of dollars in additional tax cuts. We also have a crumbling infrastructure in this country, and it is just as important that we maintain the strength of our country at home--that we have a transportation infrastructure, an education infrastructure, and a research infrastructure that continues to make us as strong as it is and that we have a national security apparatus that will protect our interests abroad. If we spend all of our money in tax cuts and defense, then we will wind up with a very hollow country.

We have got to make some tough choices going forward, and I believe that we can meet our national security needs, frankly, for less money than we spend. There are greater efficiencies; there are programs that we don't need to continue with.

Those are the choices that we are going to have to make in the years ahead because right now we are planning on more programs and more national security than we could possibly have money for in the next decade. We cannot continue to duck the tough choices that get us a national security apparatus and a Department of Defense that we can actually afford that also provides for our national security.

Lastly, I just want to close where I started and say that the product of this bill--I don't know how many pages it is this year, but it is a lot--requires a lot of work, and the people you see sitting behind us are the staff that do that work tirelessly night after night. It is a yearlong process to put it together and to negotiate with the Senate to get there. We have the most outstanding staff that I can imagine. I want to make sure that we thank them for that incredible work that they do, not just for us but for the men and women who serve in the military.

Again, I want to thank Chairman Thornberry. We work in a bipartisan manner on this committee, and, as many of you are aware, that is not easy. I have been here 20 years, and the country and this place have suddenly become more partisan. It has become more and more difficult to do anything, to pass any kind of bill where Democrats and Republicans actually work together.

The National Defense Authorization Act is a shining example of the way the legislative process should work, and many people are to thank for that, but it all starts with the chairman. It all starts with Mr. Thornberry and also with Senator McCain on the other side being dedicated to the principle, number one, of bipartisanship--of working together--and, number two, to the absolute commitment that we will get our job done. Sometimes it takes until December. I think we went all the way up to December 16 a couple of years ago, so we are way ahead of schedule this year by those standards. Sometimes it takes a long time, but we always get it done, and it is a credit to those chairmen that we do.

Mr. Speaker, again, I urge passage of this very important bill, and I thank the chairman again for his great work and all the staff for the work they did to make this possible.

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

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