[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 146 (Friday, October 17, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H9685-H9686]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1600
                   MEETING OUR RESPONSIBILITY IN IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Musgrave). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. 
Van Hollen) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the 
minority leader.
  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam Speaker, I opposed the President's decision to 
rush to war earlier this year. Many of us, at that time, warned of the 
high costs and difficulties of winning the peace that we face today in 
Iraq. But the President's poor decisions have painted our country into 
a difficult corner, and I believe that we now have a responsibility to 
provide funds and to maintain security on the ground in Iraq and to 
assist in the reconstruction of that country.
  Let us not fool ourselves or the American people. It will not just be 
the tens of billions of dollars that we passed in the bill today. It 
will require billions more in the years ahead. We also have other 
responsibilities, to level with the American people and to pay for our 
efforts in Iraq in a straightforward and up-front manner. The President 
shirked the first responsibility by failing to prepare the American 
people for the true costs of the war and winning the peace.
  Now, he seeks to escape responsibility for the second by putting 
those costs on our national credit card and running up huge deficits. 
Every penny of the $87 billion requested by the President is money 
borrowed from the next generation of Americans. His out-of-sight, out-
of-mind approach to such important issues will end up costing our 
children down the road. We should not be waging war and peace by credit 
card. If we are willing to pay the price to defeat the scourge of 
terrorism, we

[[Page H9686]]

must pay for it in an honest way. While the Bush administration has 
asked our troops and their families to make the ultimate sacrifice, the 
President has given the wealthiest Americans a huge tax cut. That is 
wrong. It is wrong to pass the buck to the next generation. It is wrong 
to ask the younger generation, including our troops and their children, 
to bear the burden alone. And it is wrong to shield the wealthiest 
Americans from paying their fair share.
  We now face a huge responsibility gap in our government. It is the 
gap between those who understand that we now have a responsibility to 
establish stability in Iraq and help rebuild Iraq and who are prepared 
to pay for it the right way and up front and those who call upon the 
country in their rhetoric to pay any price in Iraq, but then run from 
responsibly paying that price. I filed an amendment in this House to 
fill that responsibility gap. It was an amendment to scale back the 
Bush tax cut for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans to pay for the 
costs of the bill we passed today. Incredibly, the House leadership 
prohibited that amendment from even coming to a vote.
  The President is asking the American people to invest billions of 
dollars of our money to build schools, hospitals, roads, electric grids 
and communications systems in Iraq when here at home our Federal, State 
and local governments are experiencing huge revenue shortfalls in this 
very difficult economy. The President's budget request of this year 
falls $9 billion short of what was promised by we, the Federal 
Government, just a year and a half ago to meet our obligations to 
America's schoolchildren under the No Child Left Behind legislation. 
Three out of five children in this country who are eligible for Head 
Start cannot receive help because of lack of funds. Years ago, the 
Federal Government pledged to cover 40 percent of ensuring that 
children with disabilities receive a good education in this country. 
That was the right thing to do. But today we are only paying 18 percent 
of what was promised. The same shortfalls occur in health programs, our 
national transportation infrastructure, job creation initiatives and a 
range of other important domestic needs. We must meet our needs here at 
home at the same time that we meet our international responsibilities 
in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the globe. We as a Nation, 
as a people, have enormous resources. We can meet both our domestic 
needs and our international responsibilities, but we must be prepared 
to pay for them. If we refuse to pay now for our efforts in Iraq by 
reducing portions of the tax cut to the wealthiest 1 percent of 
Americans, it will make it much, much harder to make the investments 
that we also must make in education, health, transportation and other 
needs here at home.
  Already this year when many of us in the Committee on Education and 
the Workforce called for full funding for No Child Left Behind and for 
special education programs, we were told we did not have the resources 
because of the large tax cuts disproportionately weighted to the 
wealthiest. Adding this $87 billion to the deficit will make it even 
more difficult to meet those pressing needs. We must pay now for the 
costs of our efforts in Iraq. We cannot put everything on our national 
credit card.
  The President, I believe, has totally abdicated his leadership 
responsibilities in this area. Our international responsibilities now 
require us to pay the price of leadership. Leadership is about setting 
priorities. The war in Iraq was a war of choice. Regardless of what any 
of us may think about how that choice was made, we now have a 
responsibility to pay for the consequences of that choice. The 
President, by refusing to honestly pay for the war and its aftermath, 
by refusing to reverse the tax cuts on even the wealthiest 1 percent of 
Americans, refuses to acknowledge the real costs of those choices.
  There are some who argue that because the President has refused to 
scale back his tax cuts to pay for the war and its aftermath, those of 
us who believe we have a responsibility to provide security and aid in 
reconstruction of Iraq have no alternative but to support the 
President's request for $87 billion without conditions, that we have to 
go along with his plan to wage war and peace by credit card. That is a 
false choice, and, I believe, an irresponsible position. We have an 
obligation as a Congress to hold the President to a higher standard of 
leadership. If the President believes, as I do, that we now have an 
obligation to provide security and help rebuild Iraq, he should have 
the simple courage to ask the wealthiest Americans to give up some 
portion of the huge tax cuts to help pay for our efforts in Iraq. The 
choice is not between doing nothing and doing it the President's way. 
We should do it the right way.

                          ____________________