Motion to Discharge--S.J. Res. 77

Floor Speech

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Mr. COTTON. Mr. President, for many years, I have supported the annual National Defense Authorization Act. The bill always contains many worthy provisions, and it usually passes with large majorities. After all, who wants to vote no when the common refrain to pass the bill is ``Support the troops''? But at some point you have to draw the line, and this year is where I draw it.

Just look at these bills over the last few years. Five years ago, the NDAA was 968 pages--not unusual around here and something you can get your hands around. But last year, the NDAA report was 1,794 pages, and this year the report is an astonishing 4,517 pages--not even counting the classified annexes. I doubt anyone really knows what is in it except maybe some lobbyists.

And get this: As the bill grew more than sixfold in length, we had even less time to read it. The number of people who could read the bill at any one time was restricted. Social distancing--``Can't have too many people in the room,'' we were told. That is fine. I understand. We are still in a pandemic. But then we should have had more time to review the bill, not less. Yet Armed Services Committee members were asked on this floor last week to sign the bill after having only a couple of hours to review it.

As this massive bill was written in secret and then rushed to a vote, some seem to have forgotten to consult with the Commander in Chief or recall that he has veto power. It is pretty well known that the President wants the bill to reform or repeal section 230, the giveaway to Big Tech oligarchs who get to censor the American people without consequence.

The bill stiff-arms the President. There is not a word in more than 4,500 pages about section 230. The sponsors claim they couldn't airdrop provisions into the bill at the last minute. I take the point. I am not sure the President will, though, and he is the one with the veto.

But there is more. The bill condemns the President for proposing to move some troops out of Germany and restricts his ability to do so, even though NATO's frontier has shifted hundreds of miles to the east and Germany hasn't exactly carried its share of the NATO load. The Senate didn't debate this major policy change. Our earlier bill didn't even mention it. As far as I am concerned, this provision was, to borrow a phrase, airdropped without appropriate consultation with committee members. And for the record, I am a senior member of the committee, but I only learned about this provision in the newspaper on Friday, 2 days after I was asked to sign the bill.

It would appear the standard for airdropping provisions into the bill is that we won't airdrop things that support the President's priorities, but we will airdrop stuff that thwarts his priorities. I doubt that will get past the President's veto either.

This failure to consult committee members is not an isolated incident. The President's 5G plan released valuable but unused spectrum owned by the government. The Pentagon protested mightily but only with vague evidence. We had a hearing on this issue, and it sharply divided committee members. Yet, again, this bill disrupts the President's plan, and, again, we learned about it only after the fact.

Another thing that happens behind closed doors is broken promises. We were promised last summer that the radical Warren amendment wouldn't survive the conference committee. Not only did it survive; not a single word was changed.

You may have heard about the Warren amendment. You probably heard that it would merely rename some Army bases that are named after Confederate officers. There is no harm in having that debate. I have always found it curious that we don't have a base named after say U.S. Grant or John Pershing.

Yet the Warren amendment is far more radical than merely renaming a few bases. The amendment explicitly applies to all military property. That is a lot more than bases. It includes military museums, service academies, and cemeteries. Do you think I am exaggerating? I am not. Read the bill: no exceptions for museums, for academies, even for cemeteries.

Let me give you just one example. The West Point library contains portraits of Grant and Lee in close proximity, two commanders of the Civil War, juxtaposed as today's cadets learn the history of our Nation, our Army, and their own school. But that painting may have to come down. So I suppose tomorrow's cadets may learn that Grant defeated an unnamed enemy with an unnamed commander and accepted surrender from no one at Appomattox.

But if you really want to see the radical consequence of the Warren amendment, just look across the river to Arlington National Cemetery, our Nation's most sacred ground. Those gardens of stone stretch in symmetrical rows across the horizon, except for a single odd section laid out in circles, rather than rows, and with pointed headstones, rather than rounded ones. The 482 graves in Section 16 contain the remains of Americans who rebelled against our country. That section also contains a memorial to those who died in that rebellion.

We should be grateful that those rebels and their cause lost on the battlefield. Yet we should also be mindful of the historical context of this patch of our most sacred ground. Section 16 of Arlington was created as a symbol not of secession but of reconciliation by the very men who had fought for the Union.

President William McKinley--a decorated veteran of the Union Army, promoted three times for battlefield valor--oversaw its creation. In a display of magnanimity, he declared--in front of the Georgia legislature, of all places--that the Federal Government would assume responsibility for Confederate graves. He then signed a bill authorizing the reinterment of Confederate soldiers at Arlington.

Senator Warren apparently believes that she knows better how to handle the legacy of our Civil War than did the Union veterans who bled and defeated the Confederacy on the field of battle, or even Barack Obama, who continued a longstanding Presidential tradition in 2009 of sending a wreath to the Confederate section of Arlington on Memorial Day.

If the professor gets her way, a crane may drive into Arlington and rip out the memorial whose history dates back to President McKinley and which was honored just a few years ago by President Obama. Again, I am not exaggerating. In the committee markup, Senator Warren said that is exactly what she wants to happen. And if that happens, maybe the professor will be applauded in faculty lounges, but my perspective is a little different.

I served at Arlington with the Old Guard. My soldiers and I laid to rest our Nation's heroes. A lot of those funerals started in Section 16. Before those funerals started, we talked sometimes about that odd section and the war that occasioned it. After all, the Army has a lot of amateur Civil War historians. We were proud to wear the uniform of and be the heirs to Grant and Sherman and Sheridan--the great warriors who saved the Union and vindicated freedom and equality for all.

We also had a little humility. We didn't presume that we knew better than Grant and McKinley how to heal our Nation's wounds after the Civil War, or that we knew better than Abraham Lincoln, who called for ``malice toward none, with charity for all.''

Maybe Senator Warren and the Jacobins in our streets repudiate the wisdom of Lincoln and Grant and McKinley. Perhaps they think Lincoln should be canceled. A mob tried to tear down his statue just a few blocks from here last summer. Too many of these Jacobins condemn our Nation as racist to its core. They look at the Confederacy and see not a rebellion against America but the true heart of America. So, naturally, their iconoclasm doesn't stop with tearing down statues of Lee but moves right away to statues of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. They tried to tear down those last summer, too, if you recall.

I will never stand by while Jacobins tear down statues of Washington, Lincoln, and Grant, nor will I support a bill that permits a crane to drive into Arlington and desecrate that sacred ground. We celebrate the triumph of the Union and the cause of freedom and equality and the defeat of the Confederacy, but why does it follow that we have to rip paintings off the walls of libraries and museums and tear down war memorials in Arlington National Cemetery?

And I suspect a lot of other Senators wouldn't support this bill either if they knew what it does. And that takes me back to a larger problem. We were promised this radical language wouldn't be part of the final bill, but that promise was discarded behind closed doors. Now, we have a 4,500-page bill at the last minute in the rush to fund the government and pass another coronavirus relief bill before the holidays, all with the Presidential veto hanging over it.

An overlong bill negotiated behind closed doors, dropped at the last minute, major policy shifts without consensus or even much debate, broken promises, wishful thinking about a veto threat--these are the hallmarks of an NDAA process that has deteriorated rapidly in recent years. That has to change. If it doesn't change this month, mark my words, it will change next year.

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