[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 66 (Tuesday, April 24, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4906-S4907]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, recently we learned that the Ohio National 
Guard could face early redeployment. We learned the National Guard is 
being asked to train without the proper equipment. Our Guard will do 
the job well, General Wade and others in Ohio assure me, and their past 
history shows they will. Our Guard will do the job well regardless of 
the circumstances, but it is wrong to send them to Iraq with incomplete 
training, with inadequate equipment, with insufficient downtime.
  The conference report released last night echoes what many of us in 
Congress and what so many military families across our great country 
have been saying: We need a new direction for Iraq.

[[Page S4907]]

  Make no mistake, we take a back seat to no one in supporting the 
brave men and women fighting in Iraq, and we absolutely support their 
families. But more of the same is not a plan for our troops. More of 
the same, more involvement in this civil war, will not end the war in 
Iraq. This war has made our country, and our world, less safe. The Iraq 
war has cost 142 Ohioans their lives and wounded another 1,000.
  GEN Colin Powell, talking about the President's surge, the 
President's escalation of this war, has said:

       I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into 
     Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian 
     violence, this civil war, will work.

  Colin Powell, General Powell, recognizes this is a civil war, 
recognizes that the surge, the President's escalation will not result 
in a different outcome in Iraq.
  Congress will continue, of course, to fight for our Nation's military 
by working to see that they have the resources and the support they 
need and the leadership they deserve. The conference report fully funds 
and fully supports our troops while establishing conditions that will 
bring our troops home. It provides desperately needed funding to the 
Veterans' Administration to help care for the hundreds of thousands of 
new veterans created by this war.
  When we think of the carnage brought about by this war, when we think 
of the literally tens of thousands of men and women who serve this 
country and who are back from Iraq and who are in the Veterans' 
Administration health care system, we understand why we need from our 
Government literally a 50-year plan. What are we going to do for the 
next five decades for these injured men and women who have suffered 
psychological injury and physical injury? Yet this administration is 
not even funding our troops, the health care of our returning troops 
well this year, let alone planning into the future. This supplemental 
bill we will send to the President in the next few days begins the 
process of what we need to do to take care of the health and the 
welfare of these returning troops, these injured, psychologically and 
physically injured soldiers.
  If the President won't take responsibility for his failures and lead 
our troops home, then Congress needs to and Congress will. We owe it to 
our soldiers, to our sailors, to our airmen and women and to our 
marines, and we owe it to their families.
  The President should listen to military leaders and the American 
people and work with Congress to change course in Iraq instead of 
threatening vetoes. Vetoing this legislation would deny funding that 
our military needs in Iraq. It would deny funding our veterans 
desperately need who have returned home.
  The President says there is too much pork, too much spending in this 
bill, as if every other supplemental bill that previous Republican 
Congresses, the House and Senate, have sent to the President every time 
with other supplemental emergency spending has not. Mr. President: 
Please read this bill. Don't dismiss it out of hand because you don't 
like some of the language about Iraq, even though it protects our 
soldiers, even though it takes care of our veterans, even though it 
does things such as spend $3 billion for the mine-resistant ambush-
protected vehicles, vehicles that will make our troops considerably 
safer than the flat-bottomed vehicles where far too many of our troops 
have been killed or badly injured.
  This supplemental bill we are sending to the President includes 
billions of dollars for BRAC, billions of dollars for military 
construction, the kind of work we need to do to make our military even 
more efficient, even more productive. It spends $1.6 billion for 
individual body armor, something the military and the civilian 
leadership in the White House and the civilian leadership in the 
Pentagon have fallen short on, providing the kind of body armor for our 
troops and the kind of up-armor for our humvee vehicles that is needed.
  I ask again, Mr. President: Please read this bill before you decide 
what you are going to do, and then sign this bill. The VA would get 
$1.7 billion more than the VA proposal from the President, which was 
zero; it would have $39 million in polytrauma-related funding; it would 
have $10 million for blind veterans programs. It has $100 million for 
VA mental services. It has $25 million for prosthetics.

  This legislation we are sending to the President--again we ask him to 
read it before making his decision instead of dismissing it out of 
hand--has all kinds of support for our troops, for their health care, 
for their supplies, for supplying them in the field. It has way more 
money for our troops in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and for those troops 
returning home in our VA system, way more resources than the President 
has allowed in his budget.
  The President has set our Nation on a path that leads nowhere. He did 
not listen to the voters last fall. He has not listened to the Iraq 
Study Group, the bipartisan panel of very distinguished Americans. He 
has not listened to many of the military advisers, free to speak 
freely, and he has not listened to the House and the Senate majorities 
about this legislation.
  In addition, this legislation provides for help for mine safety. It 
provides for emergency spending for the LIHEAP program, for elderly 
indigent people who have had their heating or air-conditioning cut off 
because they simply can't afford to pay for their energy use at home. 
It has support for the pandemic flu. It has pandemic flu protections. 
As Senator Stabenow from Michigan said a few moments ago, it has a 
minimum wage increase, something this Senate or House has not done for 
10 years.
  Mr. President: Please read this bill before you decide whether you 
are going to sign it or veto it, and please listen again to General 
Powell, who said:

       I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into 
     Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian 
     violence, this civil war, will work.

  We are on the wrong course in Iraq. If the President signs this bill, 
it will help us redeploy our troops more quickly out of Iraq in the 
most orderly and safest way possible. It will also equally and 
importantly provide for health care for our troops, for the tens of 
thousands of injured troops who have returned home from this war.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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