Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2024
Floor Speech
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Mr. CLYDE. Mr. Chair, my amendment to the FY24 Defense appropriations bill would simply prohibit the Department of Defense from using funds to administer, implement, or enforce the proposed action by the Department of the Army regarding the removal of the Reconciliation Monument at Arlington National Cemetery.
Following 4 brutal years of the American Civil War, our Nation's great leaders, President Abraham Lincoln and future President Union General Ulysses S. Grant, took great measures to ensure that our Nation reconciled and unified after the conflict that turned fellow countryman against fellow countryman. These unifying actions included pardons for Confederate leaders that waged war as well as the restoration of confiscated property.
What these great American leaders understood is that a nation divided against itself cannot stand.
Then, in 1898, following the Spanish-American War, where Union and Confederate veterans fought side by side under one flag, the American flag, President McKinley declared in the heart of the South, in Atlanta, Georgia, the capital of my home State, that the U.S. Government would commit to sharing the burden of honoring and properly burying the Confederate dead, stating: ``Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we feel for each other. The old flag waves over us in peace with new glories.''
In 1900, Congress authorized Confederate remains to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1906, President McKinley allowed for the construction of a new monument honoring our country's new shared reconciliation from its troubled divisions.
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, unveiled this new memorial to national unity, which was designed by a Jewish-American sculptor. The memorial is topped with a woman crowned by an olive wreath to symbolize peace.
Beginning with the unveiling of the statue and now every year since, it is the tradition of the President of the United States to send a wreath to the memorial, honoring the dead buried in a circle around the monument. This tradition, which shows tremendous national unity, has been carried on regardless of party or politics of the sitting President.
In fact, even President Obama understood the Reconciliation Monument in the context for which it stood, which was unity, not division, when he continued the Presidential tradition of sending a wreath to the monument.
Despite the bipartisan support for this monument, the renaming commission established by the fiscal year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act overstepped its legislative authority and recommended that the Department of the Army remove the memorial from Arlington National Cemetery. The renaming commission's authority given to them by Congress empowers them to recommend the removal of ``names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America.''
Yet, as described previously, the Reconciliation Monument does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy. It commemorates reconciliation and national unity.
Furthermore, the renaming commission's authority explicitly prohibits the desecration of gravesites. There are hundreds of gravestones encircling the monument, and I do not know how in the world these graves will remain untouched if the Department of the Army proceeds with its proposal to remove the monument.
Former Virginia Democrat Senator Jim Webb, a decorated Marine Corps officer who served multiple combat tours in Vietnam and later became the Secretary of the Navy, recently published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal concerning the Reconciliation Monument at Arlington Cemetery.
Senator Webb describes his own journey of reconciliation following his combat tours in Vietnam. He explains how he hosted a delegation of Vietnamese officials in Washington to encourage them to be peaceful toward former South Vietnamese veterans, who were labeled as traitors after the war and had been treated as such.
Senator Webb described how to make his point to the delegation. He brought them to the Reconciliation Monument in Arlington and pointed across the Potomac toward the Lincoln Memorial to show that old wounds can be healed. Senator Webb concludes with this: If the monument is taken apart and removed, ``it would send a different message, one of a deteriorating society willing to erase the generosity of its past, in favor of bitterness and misunderstanding.''
Mr. Chair, I ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take a stand against such a divisive and history-erasing action and support my amendment to defund the effort to remove the Reconciliation Monument from the Arlington National Cemetery.
My amendment prevents this tyrannical encroachment by legislative authority, ignorance of congressional intent, and disregard of national unity.
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Mr. CLYDE. Mr. Chair, it would be an absolute disgrace if this Reconciliation Monument to our Nation's national unity is removed from Arlington National Cemetery and the graves that encircle it are desecrated.
Mr. Chair, I urge all of my colleagues to support my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. CLYDE. Mr. Chair, my amendment prevents any funds in this year's Defense appropriations bill from being spent on section 370 of the fiscal year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, providing a commonsense solution to block unnecessary and frivolous efforts to rename military bases across the country.
As a Navy combat veteran, an area of great concern for me is the inessential renaming of military bases and facilities as this issue is not a matter of national security nor an improvement of our military's combat readiness.
The Department of Defense's focus should remain on bolstering our defense capabilities and ensuring that we maintain the most lethal fighting force in the world. Instead, the Department of Defense is continuing to pursue plans to rename military bases, two of which, Fort Benning and Fort Gordon, are in my home State of Georgia.
The Department of Defense's renaming efforts are expected to cost taxpayers over $62 million and would have a detrimental economic impact in the surrounding communities.
Take Fort Gordon, for example, where local small business owners who take great pride in our Nation's military have named their establishments or attractions after the local Army base. If the name of the base is changed, then local entrepreneurs will be forced to rename and rebrand businesses, replacing merchandise and creating completely new marketing strategies, which is not cheap. In fact, in many cases, you may see that rebranding of businesses actually will cause the businesses to fail.
In rural communities like those in Georgia, this economic burden would be catastrophic, and I know communities across the country will be confronted with the same issues if we allow the Department of Defense to continue this reckless plan.
I was disappointed that earlier this year, when I offered a similar amendment to the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, these amendments were not even considered or debated on the House floor. However, we have a second opportunity right now as we look to fund the Department of Defense.
We must carefully examine how taxpayer dollars are being used to fund the Department of Defense and its policies, and I adamantly believe that Americans' hard-earned tax dollars should not be wasted on renaming military bases but should be focused on making our military the most lethal in the world.
Due to President Biden's failed leadership and Big Government socialist agenda, our Nation is facing an ongoing economic crisis. Excessive Washington spending has not only ballooned our national debt, which just surpassed $33 trillion last week, but has also inflated the prices of basic goods and services for our constituents, while running an annual deficit of almost $2 trillion.
It is simply unacceptable to spend millions of dollars of borrowed money to rename military bases and facilities only to undoubtedly burden hardworking Americans and small business owners already struggling in Joe Biden's disastrous economy.
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Mr. CLYDE. Mr. Chair, renaming does nothing to make our military more combat-ready. In fact, it is a waste of taxpayer funds. Our military defense funding should be used to make our troops the most lethal in the entire world, the most feared in the entire world. It should be spent on training, not renaming, which does absolutely nothing but divert resources from the critical mission of our military.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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