Motion to Go to Conference on S. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of Washington. 1790) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2020 for military activities of the Department of Defense, for military construction, and for defense activities of the Department of Energy, to prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House; to strike out all after the enacting clause of such bill and insert in lieu thereof the provisions of H.R. 2500 as passed by the House; to pass the Senate bill, as amended; and to insist on the House amendment thereto and request a conference with the Senate thereon.

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I want to make sure everyone understands: This provision is actually completely irrelevant. It will impact nothing, from a substantive standpoint.

There is no way our troops are going to be harmed whether we pass this instruction or whether we follow this instruction or not. That is important to understand.

We authorize military construction projects, when we authorize them, for 5 years. Every single project that the President has listed as the ones that he has stolen the money from to build the border wall that Congress expressly said they did not want to spend this money on is already authorized.

Whether or not we put an additional authorization into the fiscal year 2020 defense bill is, literally, irrelevant.

It has no impact whatsoever on whether or not the troops, their families, whatever the construction projects are, get funded or not. That will be a DOD decision. They have the authority to do it. How do they wish to spend their money?

So please don't let anyone say on this motion to instruct that if you don't vote for it, you are voting to not fund these projects. You are not. All of them are authorized for 5 years. There are a couple of projects that were first authorized in 2016, but we are in that 5-year window for every single project in question, so this has nothing to do with that.

What this amounts to is a sense of Congress on whether or not we ought to allow a President to effectively steal $3.6 billion out of the Pentagon's budget for his own personal policy desire that Congress has already said they shouldn't.

And in a bipartisan way, I am quite certain, but for the politics surrounding this issue, that Congress would emphatically say ``no.'' If we pass a defense budget that says this is where you ought to spend the money, we are not saying, Mr. President, here's a piggy bank. Have fun with it. Okay? If you find something, and it is $3.6 billion out of the military construction fund--it is actually a little over $6 billion total that the President took out of the FY19 defense budget to build a wall that Congress said they did not want.

I think this has huge implications and, as members of the Armed Services Committee, we ought to be alarmed about this. And I can guarantee you that if President Obama had done this to the defense budget, for any reason, there would have been no end to the fury about it, and rightly so. Because if we are going to say, Look, the defense budget is crucially important--in fact, particularly the members of the minority party in this body have frequently argued that the defense budget is underfunded. They will give you chapter and verse and, in fact, did just a couple of months ago, about all the areas in our defense budget that don't have enough money.

Now they are standing up and saying, as short as the defense budget is, as much as we have claimed that there is not enough money in the defense budget, we are perfectly okay with the President taking $6 billion out of it for something that has nothing to do with the Department of Defense. That is an appalling position for any member of the Armed Services Committee to take.

This motion to instruct, while irrelevant substantially, does give us the opportunity to express the sense of Congress that this should not be done for any purpose.

It is worth noting that we had a big fight about 6, 7 months ago when we shut down the government. The President said he wanted to have his wall funding, and we entered into a negotiation and, at the end of it, I think we came up with about $1.5 billion that we allowed the President for his wall. So we had that fight.

And after that fight, he decided that the Pentagon was just one big piggy bank; that what we do over here is all kinds of irrelevant. We are throwing money out there and the President can grab it for any purpose.

I will just close by saying, I disagree with one statement that the distinguished ranking member of the Armed Services Committee said, and that is, you know, We can all argue about who is responsible for this.

Seriously?

It is pretty clear who is responsible for this. The President of the United States decided to take this $3.6 billion out of existing Pentagon projects and spend it on his wall after Congress said they didn't want it to be done.

Now you want to argue that he should have, because for whatever reason, that is fine. But there is no question why we are here. And there is no question that if Congress endorses this, if Congress says it is okay for the President of the United States to use the Pentagon as his own personal piggy bank--personal is a bit of an overstatement; I understand this is policy--but basically to decide to spend money wherever he wants to spend it, irrespective of what we say, why are we even here?

Why do we even bother to authorize what the Pentagon is doing?

So, again, these projects are already authorized. If the Pentagon wants to go find the money in the $738 billion that we have now all agreed that we are going to spend, they can go find it. But there is no way that the United States Congress ought to even irrelevantly endorse this particular action by the President.

I would strongly urge every Member to reject this motion to instruct.

I want to quickly point out, again, this doesn't make any difference in terms of whether or not these projects get funded.

Then, second, I think the gentleman is correct. This is a debate about whether or not it makes sense to spend money on the wall. But I just want to emphasize two points about that:

One, regardless how you feel about the wall, you should not be in favor of being able to simply take the money out of the Pentagon to pay for it.

Second, the border crisis that we have is not going to be even remotely alleviated by a wall. The border crisis that we have right now is asylum seekers pouring up to the border and turning themselves in. Now, there are all kinds of challenges associated with that, no question, and all kinds of policies that have led to that happening.

I think it is absolutely shameful right now the way the United States of America is handling this. So many people are seeking refuge from violence and horrific conditions, and we are treating them horribly; and there is a lot that we need to do to change that.

But building a wall will not stop asylum seekers. It is a billion- dollar waste of money focusing on a campaign promise instead of focusing on the actual problem that we have. But, again, that is a debate that Congress should have. They should not have it out of the Pentagon budget. This is the wrong place for it.

I urge Members to reject this Presidential grab of money out of the Pentagon that would set a very dangerous precedent.
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