OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013

Floor Speech

Date: May 16, 2012
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Defense

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Mr. GARAMENDI. To the ranking member and the chair of the committee, thank you for a long slog of hard work and for the production of a bill that has much good in it.

Certainly, we have to provide for our military. We need a strong, agile, smart, and deadly national defense program. That's certainly in this bill. We also need to provide for our soldiers--for the men and women--and those who serve this country, and that's in this bill. The issue of those who have served and who have come home remains an issue that we'll probably take up in other legislation.

Provisions in the bill also provide for the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance necessary for us to be smart, and the bill provides for us to be agile in air mobility. Those are good things. However, there are many parts of this bill that I find objectionable, which has led to my ``no'' vote on this legislation. Let me quickly list those:

Certainly, we've already talked about, here on the floor, the issue of due process. It needs to be addressed, and I want to congratulate the ranking member of the committee for his work in developing a very good proposal that deals with the due process issue, which provides that every person in this country has full access to the civil liberties in the Constitution;

The Afghanistan war is not taken care of in this bill. In fact, there are provisions in this bill that, in all likelihood, would increase the number of soldiers in Afghanistan by some 20,000 and leave them there in perpetuity. We cannot do this. We've got to bring this war to an end very, very quickly, and the bill does not go in that direction. In fact, it goes in the opposite direction. We just heard a discussion about Iran, and I will simply second that portion of the bill as being out of place and incorrect;

There are also things in this bill that are a vast waste of money: missile defense on the east coast, a missile system that doesn't work to protect us from a nonexistent threat. Why would you spend $100 million this year and up to $5 million to $7 million in the succeeding 2 years? We ought not do that;

Some things are also to be found at home. The Lawrence Livermore Labs need to be protected.

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