[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 141 (Thursday, October 3, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H12267-H12268]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




CONCERN EXPRESSED OVER USE OF MILITARY PERSONNEL FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, yesterday I took this House floor and 
talked about my concern about military personnel staffing in the 
Speaker's office and how I felt it ran afoul of House rules. House 
rules are very clear about who can be allowed to be a fellow, who can 
be a detailee, or who can be a volunteer. Obviously my real fight is 
with the Defense Department. Today I will be firing off another letter 
to Secretary Perry who has been playing games with me for about 6 
months claiming, ``Well, she's leaving town, so if we just wait long 
enough, this will go away.''
  What I want to say to Secretary Perry is every way I read your very 
own staffing document, all gazillion pages of it, this is also in 
violation of here. They claim the people in the Speaker's office were 
assigned to the

[[Page H12268]]

Joint Chiefs of Staff legally under here. Fine, you can assign officers 
to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But there is not anywhere in here that 
says then the Joint Chiefs can take them and do whatever they want, 
have them work in bakeries, filling stations, day care centers, or the 
Speaker's office. Absolutely not. And when you are talking about very 
high-priced military staff, that is indeed a concern.
  So yesterday we talked about the House rules. Today I must say I do 
not accept DOD's explanation at all that this is valid. But let me go 
one step further and say what I think everyone in America should be 
concerned about other than the money is the fact that do we want 
military officers engaged in partisan political activities.
  Let me read you something from George Will. George Will's column 
today was praising the 104th Congress, which I do not think I would do, 
I would disagree with some of those facts, but he goes on to say in his 
column that this record has been obscured by the fog of war rhetoric 
from its leader, the Speaker, and for whom politics of war has been 
carried on through his office.
  He goes on to talk about the different tapes that have been obtained 
with the Speaker's conversations with Army officers in which they are 
filled with military jargon about ``politics is war'' and ``our budget 
fight is like the Duke of Wellington's peninsula campaign,'' and I 
could go on and on and on. But I think people are scared when they 
think we are up here playing war games with their lives, or war games 
with Medicare, Social Security, the budget or whatever we are doing. 
This should be a civil place and not a place where we are trying to 
incite civil war between two parties. I think it is very wrong to use 
military officers to come over and engage in that.
  Today in Roll Call--and I will put in the Record the Roll Call 
editorial which is a newspaper editorial that I think is very valid--it 
talks about this issue and lays out many more facts about it. It goes 
on and says, it is a very serious matter for Gingrich to systematically 
use Army personnel and facilities to train House Republican membership 
and leaders and top leadership staff in skills that they are to use to 
defeat the Democrats in partisan warfare.
  I ask you, is that what we want our military officers doing? Do we 
have so many military officers we are now going to deploy them into the 
Republican and Democratic parties--although the Democrats did not get 
any--and fight it out here?
  I say as I leave this institution that I care so much about, I think 
this is a huge cloud, and I hope we get it cleared up. I think the 
bottom line still lays with the Defense Department who clearly wanted 
to get on the new leadership's good side, and I suppose if they had 
asked them to clear out the Pentagon and let them use it for staffing 
or send cars over here or anything else, it looks like they would 
because they sent helicopters, officers, or anything they asked for. 
That is wrong. We have always kept our military separate and 
nonpartisan. These staffing rules are very clear that the military on 
active duty that are getting paid by the taxpayers are not supposed to 
be engaged in partisan activities.
  As I say this, I chuckle because a couple of years ago I worked very 
hard in transferring my military base from military to civilian status, 
and in May before the election, I was not allowed on the military base 
because it was considered too partisan, the May before the November 
election, by DOD. So you could not go to help transfer something that 
you had spent probably 18 months working on because that was partisan 
and yet they can send military officers over here, helicopters, 
facilities, train people, and be in all this dialog? No. Something is 
terribly amiss here. I really am sorry to have to keep taking the floor 
and pounding away, but I think it is very important to let Secretary 
Perry know I am not going to let this go, I hope the press does not let 
this go, and I hope the American people do not let this go.

                            War and Politics

       From Sun-tzu to Clausewitz to Mao Zedong, there's been an 
     intimate connection between war and politics. House Speaker 
     Newt Gingrich (R-Ga) has every right to be fascinated by the 
     connection, to the point of famously declaring that 
     ``politics is war without bloodshed.'' As a legislative 
     leader, he also has every right and responsibility to 
     familiarize himself with the strategies the Army is 
     developing to protect the country's national security. If 
     some of what he learns about war is intellectually applicable 
     to his political pursuits, he's clearly free to adopt it.
       It's another matter entirely, however, for Gingrich top 
     systematically use Army personnel and facilities to train 
     House Republican Members and top leadership staff in skills 
     they can use to defeat Democrats in partisan warfare. Yet 
     this, according to a two-part series to articles by Roll 
     Call's Damon Chappie, is what Gingrich did from 1993 through 
     1995, using the US Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort 
     Monroe, Va. TRADOC's contribution to the art of war: a new 
     fighting doctrine emphasizing operations that are ``rapid, 
     unpredictable, violent, and disorienting to the enemy.''
       According to documents obtained by Roll Call under the 
     Freedom of Information Act, Gingrich arranged for at least 
     seven separate TRADOC sessions for 15 Republican leadership 
     aides and six Members serving on a task force headed by Rep. 
     Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich). Costs were paid for by the Army, 
     although the purpose of the sessions seems to have been to 
     help Republicans maintain their House majority--i.e. defeat 
     the Democrats in ``bloodless'' war.
       The documents indicate that Army officials became 
     concerned--legitimately so--about being used for such a 
     purpose, especially after Hoekstra mentioned to one Army 
     colonel that the program was to be expanded to Senate 
     Republicans. The colonel suggested that Gingrich should hire 
     a retired Army officer to conduct the seminars or ``as a 
     minimum, suggest to the Speaker that we have to, in some way, 
     make this more bipartisan.
       Exactly so. Gingrich could have used Republicans party 
     finds had he chosen, but instead he used taxpayer resources--
     inappropriately, we believe. But there is an even more 
     troubling aspect here. As of January 1995, Gingrich ceased 
     being merely a Republican leader and became a constitutional 
     officer. For a House Speaker to use the Army to make ``war'' 
     on his political opposition is a misuse of the military and 
     his own office.

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