William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. TURNER. Mr. Speaker, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

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Mr. TURNER. Mr. Speaker, I greatly appreciate that the advocate to the amendment slipped into his comments that Russia cheats, because that is why we are stepping out.

Mr. Speaker, you can't have a treaty with just yourself. You have to have a treaty with two parties or more, and those parties have to comply or you really don't have a treaty.

Unfortunately, though, the gentleman went on to state that no one benefits more than the United States. It is just absolutely not true. Very publicly, we have held hearings on this in my subcommittee. The intelligence community and the DOD have openly stated that the information that we receive from Open Skies is duplicative and is even inferior to the other sources of information we have.

With respect to our allies, we don't kill this treaty by stepping out. They can stay in. If they want to do flyovers, they can do their own flyovers. The thing that we are not going to do is do the flyovers for them and then hand them the information.

But what is really important about the ``yeah, Russia cheats'' is let's talk about how Russia cheats.

Trust but verify? You can't verify if they cheat. The Kaliningrad in Europe is one of the places where Russia hosts missiles that hold all of our allies and the United States at risk. Russia limits overflights, and then Russia does a really neat trick like they invade Georgia. They declare the areas that they invade as totally new countries and then say that we can't overfly what they are doing in these areas that they occupy of our ally Georgia.

It is incredibly important that we step out of this treaty. They are not complying. It does not provide benefit to us.

The other aspect that I think probably should be the most concerning to every American listening to this, in our hearings in our committee, the DOD absolutely states that Russia incorrectly uses this information to target assets in the United States--target, that is right, to bomb the United States--which is completely a violation of the treaty.

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Mr. TURNER. Cheney).
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Mr. TURNER. Mr. Speaker, we have before us, the National Defense Authorization Act that is proceeding as a bipartisan bill. Chairman Smith committed himself to that, and Ranking Member Thornberry worked diligently to make this a bipartisan bill. So you only see the differences, as Congresswoman Cheney was saying, when you come to these amendments.

What is unfortunate about the differences between this side and that side of the aisle is amendment after amendment has been paraded on the other side of the aisle that want to disarm the United States, restrain our weapons programs, and shackle us to treaties where the other side cheats. I would have loved to have stood here while the time for this amendment was spent to implore Russia to stop cheating and to implore Russia to come to the table and begin to comply with the treaties that they have undertaken.

I would love for the time when there were discussions of amendments on the other side to shackle our nuclear weapons programs to instead point out that China is launching more ballistic missiles for testing and training than the entire rest of the world combined.

I would have loved for the speakers on the other side of the aisle to march down to the microphone and tell this country about Skyfall, the new weapon ICBM that Russia is putting together that is nuclear powered that can orbit the planet before it comes down and does its devastation.

I would have loved for our adversaries to be the target of the words from the other side and not our own programs to defend our Nation.

It is absolutely essential that we not stay in treaties that are negative to the United States and where our adversaries are not complying.

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