National Pulse Memorial
Floor Speech
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 838, I call up the bill (S. 1605) to designate the National Pulse Memorial located at 1912 South Orange Avenue in Orlando, Florida, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. 1605.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.
Madam Speaker, first of all, I want to thank all the people involved in this process. Certainly, the staff of the Armed Services Committee, our bipartisan staff, worked incredibly hard over the course of this year to put the bill together, first to get it through our committee process, off the floor and then in the negotiation process that has led to this final bill.
I think it is an incredibly important process because it includes so many people. Throughout the House, throughout the Senate, Members who have concerns in a wide range of policy areas have the opportunity in this bill to have those concerns heard and to try to address them through legislation.
When you add it all up, of all the different proposals that have come at us in the House and the Senate negotiating process, you are well north of a thousand different ideas that have been sent our way, and the staff sift through all of that, working with Members and their staffs as well, to try to come up with the best solutions.
This is an unbelievably important process because it is representative democracy. It is the way our system is supposed to work, and this bill truly reflects that. It is a bipartisan, bicameral product that took into account every single opinion that it could, and I think we have produced an outstanding product.
The number one thing that I want to make sure that people are aware of is how important the Armed Services Committee's job of exercising oversight of the Department of Defense is and how important our job of making sure that the men and women who serve our country have everything they need to carry out the missions that we ask them to do. That is what our committee does. A whole lot of other issues get involved, but at its core, that is what we are focused on. In this bill there are hundreds of provisions to help make sure that gets done and gets done well.
One of the major challenges our military faces right now is dealing with the rapid pace of technology. It is getting the Pentagon to better and more quickly adapt the innovative technologies that we need to meet our national security threats, and those threats are very real, as we are learning right now in real time, with what is going on between Russia and Ukraine, as we learn every day as we deal with an expansionist China, as we try to deal with Iran and North Korea and transnational terrorist groups. Those threats are real. Technology and innovation are crucial to meeting those threats, but we are moving too slowly at this point.
There was a commission on artificial intelligence run by Eric Schmidt and Bob Work that put a whole series of recommendations together. Jim Langevin's subcommittee worked on that. A number of proposals are in this bill to help them do a better job of handling that issue.
We had a task force last year on supply chain concerns, which we have heard so much about. A number of key provisions from that task force are in this bill. That is what we do.
Now, there are a lot of other issues, and it seems like when we get down to the end, we are always talking about the things we disagree about, which makes a certain amount of sense because, you know, you get through the stuff you can agree on, then you get down to the tougher stuff, and then you get down to the really tough stuff.
But when we get down to that really tough stuff, I really hope that people don't lose track of how important this piece of legislation is with the day in and day out work we do to support the national security and national defense of this country and to support the people who we ask to perform those tasks.
This is an outstanding bill that needs to get passed.
Now, it also happens that it is one of the few bills that consistently passes every year. Well, actually, it is the only bill that consistently gets passed every year, so we have a lot of issues from outside committees.
I forget how many hundreds of proposals we had, but at the end of the day, the hundred-plus proposals that were in this bill we got 40 percent of them included in the final product, and we are happy to do that because it helps advance important issues in a wide variety of other areas. We can't carry them all because you have got to get bipartisan, bicameral agreement. So those of you who didn't get what you wanted out of this, please look at what is in the bill and how important it is.
And the single most important thing in this bill, in my view, is we finally reformed our Uniform Code of Military Justice for how it deals with sexual assault. A stain on the military to this day is the fact that we have not adequately dealt with and protected the servicemembers who have faced sexual crimes in the military.
This is the most transformational change that we have done on that issue. We take all sex crimes away from the commander, and we create a Special Victims Prosecutor who will have the expertise, the commitment, and the focus to adequately decide what crimes should be charged and to prosecute those crimes effectively.
Now, a lot of people have worked on this. Nobody has done more than Jackie Speier. Jackie is responsible for getting this done and getting it to this point. Of all those people who worked on it, there were a lot of differences of opinion about how exactly to do it. And I know some folks think it should have been done slightly differently here, slightly differently there. This is the agreement that we can get done and get passed, and it is transformational in what it does.
It is also, I believe, crucial to dealing with one of the other major issues that we face in the military, and that is diversity.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield myself an additional 1 minute.
The diversity problem that we have with recruitment, promotion, and how is the UCMJ carried out with regard to people of color. This bill will give us the opportunity to set up a whole set of crimes that are under a new authority to take a shot at fixing that problem.
Now, I know some would like to add more crimes to that, and we had that debate. This is what we came up with, and it is huge. It is the biggest change we have had in a long time. It is worthy of our support. The entire bill is worthy of our support.
The last thing I want to say is, I want to specifically thank Mr. Rogers of Alabama, the ranking member on this committee. The bipartisan, bicameral work that we do would not be possible without leadership on both sides. I could not ask for a better partner. His staff has been outstanding, as well as we have worked to get this product.
I highly recommend this bill.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi), the distinguished chairman of the Subcommittee on Readiness.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield the gentleman an additional 15 seconds.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Courtney), chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin), chair of the Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Norcross), chair of the Tactical Air and Land Force Subcommittee.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gallego), the chair of the Intelligence and Special Operations Subcommittee.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Speier), the chair of the Military Personnel Subcommittee.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from California.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I am prepared to close at this point if the gentleman is.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Madam Speaker, I want to begin at an odd place. I don't want to discourage people from voting for this bill, but on the vaccine mandate issue, I want to make very clear that I heard a lot of things that were supposed to be done in this bill; none of that was done in the bill. We don't have anything in the bill which tells the military what they can or cannot do in terms of punishing people for refusing to meet the vaccine mandate, as a starting point. We certainly don't have anything in the bill that says natural immunity can count.
We do have language in the bill that says that the military should take a look at how the vaccine mandate could be--sorry. It is not in the bill; it is in bill language, which is a different thing. It says you can look at how the vaccine mandate is affecting recruitment and retention, and that is fine.
But all that other stuff, Madam Speaker, for those of you who are listening and thinking I may have lost my mind, I have not. We did not support that and did not do that.
That minor point aside, this is an outstanding piece of legislation that is truly bipartisan. There are a lot of small, little things here and there. But, again, the big picture is everything we do in this bill and everything that you heard, Madam Speaker, from primarily the chairs and ranking members of our subcommittee, an exhaustive list of all the provisions that are so important in making sure that we meet our obligations on national security, defense, and supporting the men and women who serve. It is a ton of work to figure out those policies, and it has never been, in my view, more important during my time in Congress.
As we have heard, we have these threats that are out there. They are real and as complex as they have ever been. Then also, we have the rapid pace of technology and innovation that is changing what is necessary to provide adequate deterrence and to provide adequate defense on a minute-to-minute basis.
The most crucial thing in our ability to meet our national security objectives is: How quickly are we going to innovate? How quickly are we going to adapt?
We are not innovating and adapting quickly enough right now, and there are a whole bunch of provisions in this bill to help push the Pentagon in the correct direction, to help make sure we give them the help they need or, in some cases, the push they need to adopt the technology that is going to move us in a better direction.
We also have a lot in this bill to help improve competition and to deal with some of the very painful cost overruns that we have seen on programs like the KC-46 tanker, programs like the F-35, and a whole series of other issues.
We introduce competition, and we introduce ways to make sure that we take advantage of technology because every time I see a cost overrun-- and the Speaker is uniquely positioned to understand this. Again, we have these terrible cost overruns we hear about, and we always hear: Oh, well, it is a software problem.
Well, yes, it is like a multibillion-dollar software problem. So why don't we fix those software problems and save us a lot of money?
This bill pushes us more in the direction of getting after those problems than any bill that I have worked on. It is an incredibly important piece of legislation that moves us forward in a positive direction.
Yes, we are also able to carry a few issues that were not in our jurisdiction. In fact, Madam Speaker, with the permission of everyone, the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee has arrived and was going to speak.
Madam Speaker, if I could yield to him just 1 minute or 2 to talk about the Committee on Foreign Affairs because the committee reauthorized a provision that is contained in this bill as well. I want to make sure the distinguished chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee has at least a couple of minutes.
Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes of my remaining time to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Meeks) to talk about the Foreign Affairs provision, and then I will close when he is done.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from New York.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, I want to start by thanking the staff for the outstanding job that they do. As I have always said, Members have constituents coming at us on a variety of different issues. We come up with ideas and say we ought to do this. And from that, that idea actually has to be written down and has to get approval. It is the staff that does all that tireless work to make sure that we get the final product that is in front of us. I really, really want to thank the staff.
I want to emphasize the fact that our staff on the Armed Services Committee is a bipartisan staff. It is the only committee in Congress that does that. Whether we are in charge or the Republicans are in charge, the staff is bipartisan, and I think that is incredibly important in getting the work done in the way that we do, working together to produce this product. This is a product every single Member of this body can be proud of, and it is a product I think every single Member of this body should vote for.
Madam Speaker, I urge passage, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
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