NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT
FOR FISCAL YEAR 1997
(House of Representatives - May 15,
1996)
MOTION TO RECOMMIT OFFERED BY MR. DELLUMS
Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is the gentleman opposed to the bill?
[Page: H5101]
Mr. DELLUMS. I am in its present form, sir.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Clerk will report the motion to recommit.
The Clerk read as follows:
Mr. Dellums moves to recommit the bill H.R. 3230 to the Committee on National Security with instructions to report the same back to the House forthwith with the following amendment:
At the end of title X (page 359, after line 20), insert the following new section:
SEC. 1041. REALLOCATION OF NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE FUNDING INCREASE.
(a) Increase in Amount for Impact Aid: The amount provided in section 301(5) for operation and maintenance for defense-wide activities, and the amount specified in section 367(a)(1) as the portion of such amount that is available for impact aid assistance, are each hereby increased by $53,000,000.
(b) Authorization for Corps Sam System.--Of the amount provided in section 201(4) for research, development, test, and evaluation for defense-wide activities that is available for programs managed by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, not less than $56,000,000 shall be made available for the Corps Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) system.
(c) Offsetting Reductions From Amounts for National Missile Defense.--The amount provided in section 201(4) for research, development, test, and evaluation for defense-wide activities, and the amount specified in section 231 as the portion of such amount that is available for programs managed by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, are each hereby reduced by $53,000,000. Of the amount specified in section 231, not more than $749,437,000 may be made available for the National Missile Defense program element.
Mr. DELLUMS (during the reading). Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the motion to recommit be considered as read and printed in the Record.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from California?
There was no objection.
Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from Texas [Mr. Edwards].
Mr. EDWARDS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this motion to recommit because I believe it is designed to help the people we should care about most, and that is the families serving in our military and their children. Specifically, this motion to recommit puts $53 million more into the Impact Aid Program, which should be called the military children education program.
Mr. Speaker, last December at Fort Hood in my district, I met with 50 soldiers being deployed to Bosnia. The second soldier I met had missed the birth of his first child because he was in Desert Storm. He was about to miss the birth of his second child because of his service to his country in Bosnia. It was a very personal experience to me in realizing the tremendous sacrifices our military families make for our country.
If we cannot guarantee that soldier he should be paid as much as we would like him to be paid, if we cannot guarantee his family will not wait in line for hospital care, if we cannot guarantee 1996 housing, one thing we should all agree is that we ought to ensure that that soldier and others like him can know when he serves his country that his child will get a first-class education. This $53 million for impact aid will help do that.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the efforts of the gentleman from South Carolina, Chairman Spence, and the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Bateman, to put $50 million in impact aid in this bill, and I support that effort. But this motion to recommit takes their good idea and takes it a step farther in making an unquestioned commitment to ensuring that the children of our military families receive a quality education. Our families deserve no less.
Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Speaker, with the remaining amount of time, let me add some additional remarks with respect to the motion to recommit.
It would provide two opportunities to achieve what this gentleman believes to be a better balance of national security priorities. The motion would increase funding for two very important programs, would pay for these increases by reducing funding for star wars-type national missile defense programs contained in this bill.
Specifically, the bill removes $109 million from star wars funding increases. It would increase funding, as the gentleman from Texas pointed out, impact aid assistance by $53 million. It would also plus-up the Corps SAM missile program by $56 million, taking it from the national missile defense program.
The gentleman from Texas articulately discussed the matter of impact aid. I will not attempt to compete with those remarks.
On the second matter, let me note that much has been made, and appropriately so, of the urgency of being able to deploy a theater missile defense. Corps SAM is a system that we need to deploy with our troops. It will travel with our forces and provide protection to them from tactical threats in the theater, the No. 1 priority threat that we have at this particular moment.
Again, we should direct our scarce resources away from fanciful and extraordinary ideas, like star wars-type programs, and into programs of demonstrated requirements. A $56-million increase in Corps SAM is precisely an appropriate type of reordering missile defense priority.
So in summary, it does two things: $56 million for theater missile defense, which ought to be the appropriate priority in missile defense, not national. We take the money from the increases in national missile defense. Mr. Speaker, $53 million of those dollars go into impact aid. As the gentleman pointed out, this is educational assistance for the children of our service personnel who ought to have the same fine education that any of our other children outside the military have access to.
Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the motion to recommit.
(Mr. SPENCE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Speaker, this is a good bill. As has been said on many occasions today, we have amply provided, I think, for the national security needs of this country. We reported the bill out of the committee by a vote of 49 to 2, a very bipartisan, as you can see, vote.
[TIME: 1530]
This authorization amounts to $600 million less than that budget figure allocation in our budget for 1997. This translates into 1.5 percent less, adjusted for inflation, than current spending.
From the standpoint of what we did for the military, we had a 3-percent raise for our troops, a 50 percent increase over the President's budget for housing allowance; things that are needed very much: family housing, barracks, child care facilities for our people.
We enhanced our military readiness by increasing the underfunded request. We added ammunition to the Marine Corps. They did not have enough to fight two major contingencies. We continued to add to the underfunded modernization programs. The Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs have asked for $60 billion in modernization beginning now. This administration only asked for about 39. We have added to it.
In short, we have done those things that the administration did not do.
From the standpoint of impact aid referred to in this motion to recommit, none was requested by the administration. This committee added $58 billion to impact aid. There were no amendments in the committee to do otherwise.
On theater missile defense, we added to the request that was submitted by the administration. I might add parenthetically on the matter of theater missile defense, it is a very important priority of this committee. As a matter of fact, last year we added to theater missile defense over the request of the administration, and the administration proceeded to spread out that which was authorized and somebody had appropriated. This year again we have added a third of what the administration request was for theatre missile defense, and so we do not really need to have anything more added to it even for impact aid or missile defense.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California [Mr. Hunter], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Procurement.
Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, let me just reiterate the theme that the chairman just elaborated on is, I think, a very important one for all of the Members to understand, and that is that this should not be, this bill should not be, a competition between whether or not we are going to give a pay raise to the troops or we are going to have the right equipment for them to use in a military conflict. It should not be a conflict. It should not be either-or.
What we have done in this bill is come up with an additional funding that allows us to have a 3 percent pay raise, it allows us to give the $300 million that the Marines need in ammunition to be able to fight the two war scenario, it enables us to get the 96 million M-16 bullets that they were short under the administration's budget, it enables us to have the theater defense and to start on the national defense just like the one that we are giving the State of Israel.
It enables us to do all those things that are important in terms of being able to project American military power and carry out foreign policy.
This is a complete package, and the gentleman has done a superlative job in bringing this thing together
on the committee level and bringing it to the floor.
Let us pass this bill. Vote `no' on the motion to recommit.
[Page: H5102]
Mr. SPENCE. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon], the chairman of our Subcommittee on Research and Development.
(Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, this is an amazing motion. We heard one of our colleagues from Texas get up and say we need money for impact aid. I have his letter from April 10 asking us to put $58 million in the bill. That is what is in the bill.
What are we talking about?
Mr. Speaker, I have heard from the colleagues on the other side saying we are spending too much money on missile defense, we have too many programs, and we need more burden sharing. What do they want to do with the motion to recommit? They want to reestablish another missile defense program that we have eliminated, and they want to do it for Europe, not for the United States, even though France has opted out of the program.
Mr. Speaker, this is amazing, it is absolutely amazing. We have heard that we want to cut programs, we have done that. We heard we want to not fund our European allies, and we have done that. So here we are being asked to support a motion to recommit to reestablish another missile defense program to protect not the United States, but the Europeans, even though one of the four partners, France, decided to opt out.
It is amazing, and I urge our colleagues do the right thing. Vote `no' on the motion to recommit and support the bill.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Young of Florida). Without objection, the previous question is ordered on the motion to recommit.
There was no objection.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion to recommit.
The question was taken; and the Speaker pro tempore announced that the noes appeared to have it.
Mr. DELLUMS. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Evidently a quorum is not present.
The Sergeant at Arms will notify absent Members.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the provisions of clause 5 of rule XV, the Chair announces that he will reduce to a minimum of 5 minutes the period of time within which a vote by electronic device, if ordered, will be taken on the question of passage of the bill.
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