Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2005

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2005 -- (House of Representatives - June 17, 2004)

Mr. NADLER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. Chairman, this debate seems to be occurring almost in a vacuum, because it seems to ignore the fact that we are at war. There was a very serious war launched upon us by the Jihadists, the Islamists, whenever you want to call them. They want to kill as many Americans as possible. Where you get the biggest bang for the buck is in an urban area, because you can kill a lot of people in a small area. If a plane crashes on a farm, maybe you kill a person or two, but not
too many more.

We are not responding properly. We are not taking it seriously enough. We ought to be spending billions and billions of dollars to properly protect all of the threatened areas of this country, all of our cities, all of our nuclear power plants, all of our chemical plants. We ought to do a threat assessment on the whole country. We ought to repeal some of the tax cuts and spend the money to defend ourselves and take it as seriously as we did in 1942, but we are not doing that.

And since we are not doing that, we have to prioritize the money that we do have, the grossly inadequate amounts of money; maybe more than last year, but the grossly inadequate amounts of money to protect ourselves against our enemies. We have to prioritize them where the real threats are. There should not be a grant on the basis of population.
In 1942, when Admiral Nimitz had to decide where to send the fleet, he did not look at where the population was on the West Coast or in Midway or in Hawaii; he said, where is the Japanese fleet likely to attack, and that is where you spend the money and send the aircraft carriers.

We are probably going to be attacked again. Thousands of people may die, and our job is with the money that is made available to spend it in the way most likely to minimize the casualties in this country.

That is what this amendment seeks to do. Is it fair? No, it is not fair. It would be fair if we spent a few billion dollars
more to defend our people. That would be more fair.

But we do not have that money. It is a different debate. We should spend the money based on the threat, and the threat we know, as the gentleman from Illinois said before, we know where the enemy, where Osama bin Laden and his friends and confederates, we know what they are looking at. They are looking at our major urban areas. They are looking at the Space Needle in Seattle, the Sears Tower in Chicago and so forth.

Yes, the bill that the committee propounded in some respects is better than the inadequate proposal that the President made, and I commend the committee for it; but this amendment makes it better yet.

The fact of the matter is, we passed a tax bill earlier today that gives great breaks for tobacco farmers. It has a tobacco buyout in it. I did not hear anybody from New York saying, my God, we should not do that. Nobody in New York benefits. Nobody in New York benefits from the wheat subsidy. We do not complain about that because we do not have any wheat farmers in New York. We should not benefit from the wheat subsidy.

The money that is appropriated by this Congress ought to go where the need is for the purpose for which it is appropriated. The money that is appropriated to defend us in a war ought to go where it is going to be maximally efficient in its use in protecting Americans from enemy attack. That is what this amendment does. That is why it ought to be adopted. Everything else is irrelevant.