Providing for Consideration of H.R. Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year Relating to Consideration of House Report and Accompanying Resolution; and for Other Purposes

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. LANGWORTHY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding the time.

Madam Speaker, I strongly support the rule before us today and the underlying legislation that will ensure that our Department of Defense stays laser focused on military readiness, supporting our servicemembers and their families, and keeping our greatest adversaries in check.

For years, this administration was allowed to waste hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to force a woke agenda on the men and women of our military; hobbling their training, their morale, and their long-term success, all while our greatest adversary, China, relentlessly developed its own military, including even pulling ahead of us in the development of hypersonic missile technology. Today, China possesses hypersonic missiles that can hit our shores, but we do not yet have the capabilities to completely deter this particular threat.

The legislation under the rule before us today focuses key resources on this technology, part of which is developed right in my own district in New York's southern tier.

We cannot delay this any longer, and we cannot effectively secure our Nation and deter our adversaries, including China, without ridding our Nation's military of the radical left Green New Deal agenda that they seem to embed in our defense policy moving forward.

This policy of battery-powered vehicles harnessed by resources sourced from a supply chain dependent on Communist China leaves our Nation less secure and more vulnerable than ever before.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle point to the Biden administration's transition to electric noncombat vehicles in our Armed Forces as a win for the environment, but I ask them: Is it really a win for the environment if we source these critical minerals from strip mines in Congo and transport them across the globe to be refined in countries that ignore many of the environmental regulations that we take for granted here in the United States?

Are we really protecting the environment when we foist inefficient, unreliable vehicles on our Nation's military while China and India build hundreds of new coal power plants every single year?

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle know the answer, but they would rather push their false, fairytale narrative that these policies are going to reduce global emissions to score political points.

They ignore the dangerous situations that these policies ultimately put our military servicemembers in. We need commonsense policies that focus on merit, lethality, and readiness to shape our military in the coming years, not the woke dreams of a radical left that would prefer a country to not have a military at all. We certainly know that they don't believe that we should have a border, as the policies of the Biden administration have so thoroughly illustrated to the American people.

I urge my colleagues to support the rule before us today and help pass another bold, focused, and crucial NDAA that will support our servicemembers and ensure that the U.S. military remains the strongest fighting force on the face of the Earth.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source