Continuing Resolution

CONTINUING RESOLUTION -- (Senate - February 08, 2007)

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Mr. CORNYN. I appreciate the courtesy of the senior Senator from Texas in giving me a few minutes to speak on this continuing resolution.

This is, to say the least, disappointing. We have a bill that addresses more than $400 billion worth of spending but cuts $3.1 billion from our men and women in uniform for the Department of Defense at a time when we hope to be able to build facilities in the United States to accommodate them and their families as we bring them back from places such as Europe and Korea and elsewhere. We know that we have an all-voluntary military. As a member of a military family myself--my father was in the Air Force for 31 years--it is more than just the individual servicemember who serves; it is a family proposition.

I urge the majority leader and the majority to reconsider this cut of $3.1 billion in the very meat and bone of what it takes to recruit and retain a volunteer military. As the saying goes, you recruit an individual servicemember but you retain a family. These kinds of cuts, $750 million of which will come out of the money that is allocated for the State of Texas, are just extraordinarily unwise.

I have heard rumors to the effect that the majority is going to try to add this money back in the supplemental appropriations bill we will be taking up, I guess sometime in March. Of course, that would be a budgetary trick which would exacerbate the budget deficit and be in stark conflict with the kind of rhetoric we have heard from our colleagues on the majority side who have said that we need a pay-as-you-go budget. In other words, if there is going to be spending, there has to be commensurate offsets.

Cutting out of this so-called continuing resolution or Omnibus appropriations this $3.1 billion for our military families and then coming back and adding it in as emergency spending in a supplemental avoids the budgetary requirement of an offset and, thus, will add to additional deficits which are irresponsible and certainly in conflict with the statements our colleagues have made on the other side.

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http://thomas.loc.gov/ Mr. CORNYN. I am proud to be a cosponsor, along with the distinguished senior Senator from Texas, of an amendment which would accomplish that goal. This is the way to handle our budgetary responsibilities appropriately. I implore the majority leader to allow us an opportunity to have amendments and to have a full and fair debate on this continuing resolution. We started this Congress in a spirit of compromise, but certainly if the amendment tree is filled and we are denied an opportunity to have debate and consideration of an amendment such as that, it would be extraordinarily disappointing and in conflict with some of the early rhetoric and hopes we all had for bipartisan cooperation.

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