Providing for Further Consideration of H.R. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 583 and ask for its immediate consideration.

The Clerk read the resolution, as follows: H. Res. 583

Resolved, That at any time after adoption of this resolution the Speaker may, pursuant to clause 2(b) of rule XVIII, declare the House resolved into the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union for further consideration of the bill (H.R. 2670) to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2024 for military activities of the Department of Defense and 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.

Sec. 2. (a) No further amendment to the bill, as amended, shall be in order except those printed in the report of the Committee on Rules accompanying this resolution and amendments en bloc described in section 3 of this resolution.

(b) Each further amendment printed in the report of the Committee on Rules shall be considered only in the order printed in the report, may be offered only by a Member designated in the report, shall be considered as read, shall be debatable for the time specified in the report equally divided and controlled by the proponent and an opponent, shall not be subject to amendment, and shall not be subject to a demand for division of the question in the House or in the Committee of the Whole.

(c) All points of order against the further amendments printed in the report of the Committee on Rules or amendments en bloc described in section 3 of this resolution are waived.

Sec. 3. It shall be in order at any time for the chair of the Committee on Armed Services or his designee to offer amendments en bloc consisting of amendments printed in the report of the Committee on Rules accompanying this resolution not earlier disposed of. Amendments en bloc offered pursuant to this section shall be considered as read, shall be debatable for 30 minutes equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Armed Services or their respective designees, shall not be subject to amendment, and shall not be subject to a demand for division of the question in the House or in the Committee of the Whole.

Sec. 4. At the conclusion of consideration of the bill for amendment the Committee shall rise and report the bill, as amended, to the House with such further amendments as may have been adopted. The previous question shall be considered as ordered on the bill, as amended, and on any further amendment thereto to final passage without intervening motion except one motion to recommit.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern) the ranking member of the Rules Committee, pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only. General Leave
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Rules Committee met and reported out a rule, House Resolution 583, providing for further consideration of H.R. 2670, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, or NDAA, under a structured rule. It makes in order 80 amendments for consideration on the floor, and it provides for one motion to recommit.

I rise today in support of the rule and the underlying legislation.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the House passed a rule setting the parameters for general debate on H.R. 2670 and making in order 289 amendments. At the time, we made clear that the work of the Rules Committee was not yet finished. There was additional work that was left to be done, additional considerations to be had, and additional member priorities to take into consideration.

After a robust discussion, we reported out the rule that is before us today. Taking up this rule will allow us to advance our work forward and will move H.R. 2670 toward a vote on final passage.

Mr. Speaker, I know some in this House will express frustration with the process. Yes, perhaps it would have been more convenient for us to have done our work more quickly.

As this House is well aware, the NDAA is one of the most critical pieces of legislation the House considers each year. It sets overall policy for the Department of Defense and the armed services and allows Congress to set our defense priorities for the year. Perhaps most importantly, it authorizes spending levels on national defense for the fiscal year.

Mr. Speaker, on a bill that is this critical to the Nation, it is much more important for us to get things right rather than to do things quickly. When dealing with national defense, we have a sacred obligation to give the American people our best efforts. Although this may have taken a bit longer than anyone, including myself, would have liked, I am proud to say that the rule fulfills that obligation.

I like to think of this, Mr. Speaker, as a process where the House has been working its will. Frankly, we will have a pretty spirited debate here, I suspect, but it is worth noting that the underlying bill that came out of the House Armed Services Committee is pretty much intact. In other words, it has been changed very little in the amendment process yesterday, and I would argue it will be changed relatively little by the amendment process today.

The majority of the items that we deal with today are going to shift. These aren't going to be straight partisan debates in many cases. My friend, Mr. McGovern, and I will probably be on the same side when it comes to helping Ukraine in what we think is a very important struggle. We will probably be on different sides when we come to cluster munitions and whether they should or should not be used. Uncharacteristically, I will be on the President's side, and my friend will have a different opinion on that.

I say that just to say that that's how this place is supposed to work. You move back and forth, you pick the right decisions, and at the end of the day, there will be a final product and we will have a straight up or down.

Before anybody gets too elated or too disappointed, I will remind everyone that it is not as if this is the last day. This is a vehicle, if it passes, that we will take into conference, and that will be a conference between a Republican House, a Democratic Senate, and it will involve a Democratic President.

Mr. Speaker, I say all that to say that I suspect the process will continue to change the product as we move along. Again, I wouldn't be too giddy if I won today, and I wouldn't be too disappointed, no matter what your particular issue is, if I lost. I do think it is critically important that the vehicle move and that we push forward and sit down and work with our colleagues on the other side of the Rotunda in the Senate, and work with the President of the United States at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. We need to make sure that we do--for the 63rd consecutive year--what we have done for 62 years, and that is provide for the common defense of the country.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is worth remembering that this is going to be a bipartisan product at the end of the day. There is no way a Republican House, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic President are going to do anything on any issue that is not essentially bipartisan. That is the way the process works.

No matter what is happening at a given moment, I think we are preordained to come to an agreement that broadly reflects compromise.

Mr. Speaker, we have had two very late nights at the Rules Committee, and I thank particularly my friend, the ranking member, and each and every member of that committee for putting in the hours that it took. I thank our staffs on both sides of the aisle who worked really, really hard.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the staff of the House, particularly our overworked stenographers that were staying there late at night to make sure that we got our job done.

Again, I credit my friend, the ranking member, for this. We have had the good fortune to serve together on this committee for a long time. We had a contentious debate last night, but it was always a civil debate and it was always a professional debate.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud of the tenor he set for our committee when he was chairman. I am proud of the manner in which he approaches his work each and every day. I am very proud to have the opportunity to work with him in the House.

Again, we will have our differences today--fair enough. I thank my friend for the kind of committee member that he is and, frankly, his commitment to the institution. I say that about each and every member on the Rules Committee on both sides of the aisle, and about their staff and about the staff of the full House that facilitates our ability to work together and produce a product.

I want to go back to a point on this issue of abortion. Quite frankly, we look at this issue very differently. As my friend, Mr. Roy from Texas, said, we see the administration as having directly intervened and changed existing policy.

We have something called the Hyde amendment, which has been passed for years, decades, over and over again, and it prohibits using Federal tax dollars for abortion. Facilitating abortion is exactly what we are talking about here.

Now, was there any consultation with us when the executive branch decided to do that? No, there wasn't.

As my friend from Texas pointed out, there is a pretty big pushback on our side.

We have worked in a bipartisan fashion. That is why that bill came out of committee 58-1. Most of the amendments on this floor in the last couple days have been bipartisan, and we have worked together.

There are issues where we simply don't agree, and this is, at the end of the day, a majoritarian institution.

While my friend talks about the extremist this or the extremist that, if it is an extremist amendment, it won't win the majority.

These amendments that are going to come up here are either going to win or lose. Some of them are going to lose.

Some of the time, my friend and I are actually going to be voting the same way on those amendments. Other times, we will vote differently. We will certainly vote differently at the end of the day when it comes time to vote on the bill.

That is the way the game is played here. To say that some majority is being run by extremists, by definition, that is almost impossible because you can't be the majority on the House floor if it is true.

Again, you can disagree, and I respect the disagreement, but the initiator, particularly in the case of abortion and I would say some of the other culture clashes that we are having on this bill, has been the administration, has been policies that were decided in this administration and sometimes pushed on the military against their own wishes.

Again, it is the executive branch. They get to run the military. They get to do what they want to do. But please, when you get a response from people that genuinely disagree, to say they started it by responding is simply not the case.

Again, I look forward to this debate. I understand that people will have very different opinions. I do remind everybody that 95 percent of this bill is this bill, you know. It was bipartisan. It does deal with the military. Very little of much of the debate has dealt with the military.

I actually sit on the Defense Appropriations Committee. We spend a lot of time talking about what is the right mix of arms? What is going to happen in terms of artillery? What are we doing to update AWACS? I can go on and on. Most of the discussions in the House Armed Services Committee were similar.

Again, we are going to have these differences and let the chips fall where they may. I would suspect whatever product comes off this floor will be the product that the majority of this body chose.

Then we will go, as my friends well know, to sit down with the United States Senate, and they will have a different product, and the President will be part of that discussion because he has to sign the bill.

We are going to have a pretty good tussle here. To think this is the be-all and end-all today I think is a disservice to the process and how it unfolds and how it actually works.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close whenever my friend is.

In closing, I urge all my colleagues to support this resolution. Today's rule makes in order 80 amendments reflecting Member priorities on both sides of the aisle.

Although I would have liked to have worked more quickly, on a matter that is so critical as the annual NDAA we owe the American people no less than whatever time is necessary to complete this important task.

I remind the House that the NDAA has been passed into law every year for 62 consecutive years. I am confident that with today's rule, we are well on the way to making it 63.

Mr. Speaker, again, I want to point out and emphasize several important facts that sometimes get lost in the spirited debate.

The first one is that about 95 percent of this bill is exactly what passed out of the House Armed Services Committee 58-1, as my friends have pointed out, and I agree. Most of this bill is extraordinarily bipartisan. Most of the amendments that have come to this floor, 300 yesterday, or 290, roughly, were bipartisan and were accepted no matter who authored them, Democrat or Republican, by either side.

As I said yesterday, this was going to be more contentious today, and that is fine. But to suggest that anything you disagree with that passes is extreme, I think, frankly, you are leaping to a conclusion.

Some of these amendments that my friend points to the most probably won't pass, probably won't make it. Again, there is nothing inappropriate about that. I mean, I have come down here--and I know my friend has--plenty of times and fought for things that we believed in that may have been right or wrong, but we lost or won. What comes out of here will be what a majority of the House decides is appropriate.

Now, as I have said multiple times in the course of the debate, this is a process, not an event. The reality is, we are going to sit down at some point, almost certainly, with the Senate and the President. The Senate is Democratic, and the President is a Democrat. We are going to have a discussion and a debate, and I suspect the product that comes out of that will be different than the one that emerges here. That is okay. It will be different than what the Senate writes, and it will be different than what the President's budget was and what he proposed.

Nobody is going to get everything they want. At the end of the day, everybody is going to have to give and take, and the reality is if we get to a bill, which I think we will because we have for 62 consecutive years, it is going to be a bipartisan compromise.

We can have all the theatrics and all the flailing of arms. That is part of the process, too. At the end of the day, almost all of this bill is bipartisan, and almost all of this bill is supported by the majority of both sides of the aisle. There are individual flash points where we disagree.

I know about getting rolled in debates. I remember my Democratic friends spending $1.9 trillion without a single Republican vote and unleashing the worst inflation we have seen in 40 years. I remember them bringing a bill to this floor called the Inflation Reduction Act that had zero to do with inflation and was everything about green climate. Fair enough. If you want to do that, that is okay. You didn't get a single Republican vote, but you won, and you got it through the Senate and got the President of the United States to sign it.

There are plenty of times that one side has steamrolled the other. There are other times when we negotiate together. Welcome to the House of Representatives and to American politics.

What we are going to deal with today, there will be a lot of sound. There will be a lot of noise.

Most of the bill is bipartisan. It is an extraordinarily good bill. As a matter of fact, lost in the course of this debate is one of the areas where my friends and I do disagree, and I disagree with the bill, and that is that we are coming in at the President's number. This outrageous, terrible bill is going to be at the number the President proposed. I think that number is too low--I really do--but I am going to vote for it because it is still better than last year and better than a CR, and it moves the country in the right direction.

Mr. Speaker, again, I have enjoyed the debate. I always do. I will close by thanking my friend. I mean this with all sincerity. I will end where I began. We have been through a couple of challenging days in the Rules Committee, very long nights. I very much appreciate the professionalism of my friend and his colleagues and my colleagues on my side of the aisle. I very much appreciate the staff that worked very hard on both sides of the aisle and also the wonderful House support staff that we had facilitating our meetings. I thank them all, and I particularly thank my friend.

The material previously referred to by Mr. McGovern is as follows:

An Amendment to H. Res. 583 Offered by Mr. McGovern of Massachusetts

At the end of the resolution, add the following:

Sec. 5. Immediately upon adoption of this resolution, the House shall proceed to the consideration in the House of the resolution (H. Res. 178) affirming the House of Representatives' commitment to protect and strengthen Social Security and Medicare. The resolution shall be considered as read. The previous question shall be considered as ordered on the resolution and preamble to adoption without intervening motion or demand for division of the question except one hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Ways and Means or their respective designees.

Sec. 6. Clause 1(c) of rule XIX shall not apply to the consideration of H. Res. 178.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source