[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 67 (Wednesday, April 25, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H4163-H4168]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Murphy) is 
recognized for 50 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to be 
able to kick off what I hope will be a very interesting hour. Every 
week we try to get together at least once as members of the 30-
Something Working Group at the pleasure of the Speaker of the House to 
talk about some of the most pressing issues, not only to this country 
at large, but in particular to the young people of this country. I 
appreciate the Speaker giving us this opportunity.
  We are hopefully going to be joined today by some of the veteran 30-
Something Members, but we are going to kick today off with Mr. Altmire 
of Pennsylvania and myself and our special guest today from New 
Hampshire, young-at-heart Paul Hodes.
  Madam Speaker, I think the gentleman from Georgia is right on one 
point at least, that this is a sobering week here in the halls of 
Congress. We have had a lot of bad news this week. We have mourned the 
death of far too many young people at Virginia Tech. We have mourned 
the loss of one of our own here on the House floor. We are wrapping up 
a month in which we have seen 86 more soldiers die on the battlefields 
of Iraq amidst a growing civil war, a war now that has cost over 3,300 
lives, 24,000 wounded and $379 billion spent.
  Our friend who just gave the final 5-minute speech on the other side 
of the aisle suggested that the silence was deafening from the 
Democratic side tonight in this Chamber. Well, we were talking all day. 
We were talking last week and the week before. There was no silence on 
this side of the aisle. For the first time, for the first time, this 
Congress picked its head up out of the sand to realize what is really 
happening over in Iraq.
  You can talk all you want about failure and defeat and victory, but 
you have got to be a little bit clear about what we are talking about 
over there, because maybe we entered into a fight with an army 
commanded by Saddam Hussein, but we have now got ourselves mired in 
what is a civil war.
  Madam Speaker, I got the chance, along with five other Members of 
this body, three Republicans, three Democrats, to go over to Iraq and 
Afghanistan a few weeks ago, and we asked the generals on the ground a 
very simple question: Of all of the fire that you find yourselves in 
the middle of on the streets of Baghdad, tell us what percentage of 
that which is directed at U.S. forces is a fight from insurgents 
directly against the United States, and tell us what percentage of that 
fire is sectarian strife, Sunnis and Shia fighting each other.
  I have to tell you, listening to the other side, you would have no 
clue that the answer was 90 percent. Ninety percent of the fire 
directed at U.S. forces is simply by virtue of us being in the middle 
of what has become a civil war there.
  So you can continue to bury your heads in the sand while we talk 
about this tonight, but we choose not to. We chose to side with the 
American people, 60 percent of whom say unequivocally that they want a 
timetable to bring our troops home. We sided with the Iraq Study Group, 
some of our top foreign policy leaders in this country, Republicans and 
Democrats, who unanimously stood up to say it is time to redeploy our 
forces. We stood with some of the brightest and most courageous 
military generals.
  We have come to the position that it is de rigueur for generals to 
speak out against the war, because it seems that there is a new one 
coming out and talking about the tragedy of this war every day. Well, 
this didn't happen up until the Iraq conflict. You have never seen this 
number of former military men standing up and suggesting we need to set 
a different course.
  So maybe this is a little bit of a quiet room tonight after a very 
long day, but, yes this was a loud and boisterous hall earlier tonight, 
because for the first time in a long time, this Congress stood up and 
excerpted the will of the American people.
  Before I kick it over to Mr. Altmire and Mr. Hodes, let me just 
quickly talk about what we did here today.
  You want to talk about supporting the troops. Let's talk about the 
fact that this bill had every dollar that the President asked for in 
it, and more. And more. We put in more money to make sure that every 
single troop has the equipment, the protection, the armor that they 
need.
  This bill has $1.7 billion in additional money beyond what the 
President asked for for veterans, $1.7 billion beyond what the 
President asked for for healthcare for our existing armed forces.
  You want to talk about supporting the troops, then you better look at 
the words and the numbers in this bill, balls what the President 
wanted, he got, and we put more on top of it to

[[Page H4164]]

make sure that every single soldier is taken care of on the 
battlefield, and when they return to this country, they are not just 
given average healthcare, but they are given the gold standard of 
healthcare when they come back here.

  What we did on that bill was for the first time suggest that this 
commitment cannot be open-ended. For Mr. Hodes and Mr. Altmire and 
myself, we have gotten the opportunity over the last few weeks to go 
back and talk to our constituents, and you are having to turn over a 
bunch of different rocks as time goes on to find people who are still 
willing to say that we should have absolutely no end to our commitment 
there. That we should do virtually nothing to force the Iraqis to stand 
up for themselves.
  Let me give you one important quote from this week. Folks on the 
other side of the aisle will say that this timetable is somehow harming 
our efforts there. They maybe should speak to our own Secretary of 
Defense, who just this week said this: ``The strong feelings expressed 
in the Congress about the timetable probably have had a positive impact 
in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended 
commitment.''
  Our own Secretary of Defense, the spokesman on matters of war for 
this President, says that our discussion here about ending our open-
ended commitment, about forcing the Iraqis to stand up for themselves, 
has had a positive effect. So to our friends on the other side of the 
aisle, they might want to check with the administration before they 
cast aspersions on the work that we are doing here.
  The last thing to say. The last thing to say. We better put some 
definition on what war we are fighting here. I know Mr. Hodes wants to 
say something about this as well. This is not a war for us that needs 
to be fought between two sectarian parties in Iraq. This is a war on 
the people that attacked this country. Maybe some people on the other 
side of the aisle haven't noticed, but the people that attacked this 
country came from Afghanistan, a country that we have left behind.
  We had a chance to visit Afghanistan just a few months ago, and we 
found that the Taliban is in a resurgence there. We found that the new 
power player in the Middle East, Iran, is starting to meddle in the 
affairs of Afghanistan, in part because we haven't put the money and 
the troops and the resources and the infrastructure dollars behind our 
effort there to make sure that it is a self-governing country.
  We have got fights all over the globe that this country needs to be a 
part of if we really want to talk about making this country safe. So 
when we talk about redeployment, we mean it. It is not just about 
withdrawal. It is not just about taking every single troop who is over 
there and bringing them home to their families. We would love to do 
that. There is not a single one of us who hasn't spent an amount of 
time with the National Guard and the Reserve troops that have been so 
heavily stressed by these multiple deployments. There is not one of us 
who has not sat with active duty families who have seen their family 
members deployed once, twice, three times, over to Iraq and 
Afghanistan.
  We would love to bring every single one of them home. But we know 
that the reality of this new world order is that we have got to have a 
much more global view. We have got to make sure that we have the troops 
necessary to be committed all over the globe, to make sure that we 
recognize how broad the threat to this country is today.
  That is not what we are doing right now. That is not what we are 
doing. In fact, what we have done is created a safe haven for 
terrorists. We have created what our own intelligence community calls 
the cause celebre for the Islamic extremist movement in this world, to 
find shelter in Iraq, to breed, to train, and then to present an even 
greater threat to this country.
  So, yes, Madam Speaker, there was a little bit of celebration on this 
side of the aisle when we passed this bill tonight. Not because this 
isn't the most serious subject that this House will face over the next 
2 years. It certainly is. We take that as a grave responsibility that 
it so deserves. But because it is about time that we picked our heads 
up out of the sand and said in our gut, in our conscience, we cannot 
allow our military forces to continue to be the referee of a civil war. 
And in our gut and in our conscience and in our head we know that this 
fight is broader than just what happens on the streets of Baghdad. This 
is a global fight against the people that took us on, and by 
redeploying those forces, by doing the right things by the soldiers who 
are on the ground in the middle of this civil war, by making a 
commitment as strong as ever to our troops and to our veterans, we 
finally, we finally, started imposing a foreign policy that will 
guarantee the security of this country, not just for the next week or 
the next month, but decades and hopefully centuries.
  Madam Speaker, I would like at this point to yield, if I could, to a 
good friend and one of our new 30-Somethings, the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania, Mr. Altmire.

                              {time}  2230

  Mr. ALTMIRE. I thank the gentleman from Connecticut. And I wanted to 
spend some time talking about what this bill actually does, because I 
heard some rhetoric during the debate from the other side that I 
couldn't believe I was hearing, because it had nothing to do with the 
facts of what's really in this bill. I heard Members stand up and say 
that the goal of the Democrats is to cut the funding for our troops and 
cut and run and do an immediate withdrawal. And none of that is in this 
bill. That is not what we voted on today.
  And the great thing about democracy, the great thing about this 
House, the House of Representatives of the United States is that we 
have people who represent every side of the political spectrum. And 
there are a handful of Members who feel so strongly about this issue 
that they feel we need to immediately cut the funding and immediately 
withdraw our troops and bring them home. And they are very vocal. And 
what's interesting about that group is they didn't support this bill. 
The people who feel so strongly that we need to cut the funding and 
bring our troops home immediately voted against this bill, along with 
the Republicans.
  So when I hear Members on the other side talk about what our goals 
are, and then I think of the fact that they are the ones that voted 
with the people who want to bring our troops home immediately and 
immediately cut the funding, that leads me to believe that perhaps they 
didn't read the bill closely enough, or maybe there's just some 
rhetoric that's being thrown around that they know is not true.
  And what I would suggest to my colleagues, and certainly to the 
American people, is you look at what is in this bill. And we've talked 
about this before when we passed the first bill before it went to 
conference. We give the President more money than he asked for. The 
conference report that we voted today, 4 billion more dollars to go to 
Iraq and support our troops than President Bush asked us for. That's 
not cutting the funding. That is supporting our troops.
  We increased funding for the Department of Defense health care 
facilities to make sure that situations like Walter Reed never happen 
again. We increased funding for the Veterans Affairs health care system 
to make sure that we have adequate coverage for our Nation's veterans, 
because, as we have talked about many times on this floor, there is no 
group that should stand ahead of our Nation's veterans when it comes 
time to make funding decisions.
  And this bill, for now the fourth time in 4 months, we have voted to 
increase funding for the Veterans health care system, and not continue 
the past 6 years of chronic underfunding for the VA health care system.
  And finally, this bill does, in fact, add some accountability to the 
process. The only remaining leverage that we have left in Iraq, almost 
4 years to the day after we were told the mission was accomplished, 
that date was May 1, the only remaining leverage we have left is our 
presence there.
  The gentleman from Connecticut talked about how he was in Iraq, and I 
don't want to put words in his mouth, but I am sure you spoke to some 
of the leadership over there and experienced the fact that the Iraqi 
government has not stepped up to manage their own affairs and 
administer their own government. In fact, they have failed miserably in 
that action, and they show no

[[Page H4165]]

sign of being willing to step up to the plate. And the only leverage we 
have to make that happen, and that is the only solution to this 
conflict, is a political solution. There's no military solution 
because, it has, as you said, degenerated into a civil war. The only 
leverage we have there is our presence there. And until we say, loud 
and clear to the Iraqi government, that our presence there is not open 
ended, that we do consider this to be a situation that they need to 
step up, administer their own affairs and run their own government, 
nothing's going to change. And we did have, 4 years ago today, an 
announcement that the mission was accomplished; and we'll be here next 
year and the year after and the year after, and we'll still be waiting 
for the Iraqi government to step up unless we take affirmative action 
to add some accountability, which is what we did in this bill today.
  So I'm going to give it back to the gentleman so he can talk to Mr. 
Hodes momentarily, because I know he's chomping at the bit to say what 
he has to say. And I'm looking forward to hearing it myself.
  But I just want to be crystal clear, this bill, in no way, represents 
a cut in funding for our brave men and women who are serving us in 
Iraq. It has more money in it for our troops, direct aid for our 
troops, than the President asked for. Make no mistake about that.
  So at this point I would yield back to the gentleman from 
Connecticut.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I want to read it one more time, Mr. 
Altmire, just because it backs up everything you said. I want to read 
it one more time. Secretary Gates. ``The strong feelings expressed in 
the Congress about the timetable probably have had a positive impact in 
terms of communicating to the Iraqis this is not an open ended 
commitment.'' I mean, that's worth saying again, because for all the 
rhetoric that we get about what we are doing here and what kind of 
impact it has in Iraq, we have our Secretary of Defense telling us 
exactly what has been our intuition for years; that the only way, Mr. 
Altmire, just like you said, the only way for us to exert any pressure 
on the Iraqis to stand up for themselves, to get their military shop in 
order, to get their civil shop in order, to get their political stop in 
order, is to tell them that we are not going to be the crutch that they 
can rely on in the long run. We've recognized that here for a very long 
time. Our Secretary of Defense now joins us in that.
  And at this point I would like to turn it over, yield to Mr. Hodes.
  Mr. HODES. Well, I thank my friend from Connecticut and my friend 
from Pennsylvania for being here. You know, I'm on the something side 
of 30, but we are all new Members here tonight. And we came here, in 
large part, because the American people are way ahead of the 
politicians in this country. And the American people have had it with 
this exercise in Iraq. In overwhelming numbers, they, in their wisdom, 
have had it, and they spoke loud and clear to that in November of this 
year and that, in large part, is why we, and many of our colleagues, 
are now privileged to serve in the House of Representatives.
  And what we have done today in passing the Iraq accountability bill 
is truly historic. And it started here in the House; it went to the 
Senate through the wisdom of our founders. There was a conference of 
House and Senate leaders. The bill came back here in slightly altered 
form. And now, as we sit here tonight, speaking about this bill, it's 
on its way to the desk of the President of the United States. And the 
President of the United States has a choice to make about the direction 
of this country. He, now, has a choice to make. He has a choice to make 
about supporting the troops. He has a choice to make about holding the 
Iraqis accountable, as he said he was going to do. He has a choice to 
make about supporting our veterans. He has a choice to make about 
supporting our wounded, whose care has been a disgrace, as many of us 
have seen. The President of the United States has these choices to 
make.
  Now, we have had a lot of rhetoric in the chamber today, and our 
colleagues on the other side of the aisle called this shameful. They 
accused us of weakening America. They essentially questioned our 
patriotism. They said we didn't support the troops, and that is 
poppycock. It's disinformation. It's not true.
  We all, whether we are Democrats or Republicans, and I know this is 
true of the people in this country, care deeply about this country. And 
what we want to see is an America with real strength that is protecting 
the real security of the American people, and that is leading the 
world, as we once did, as the most credible of nations, as the nation 
which, in World War II, stood up to lead the fight against fascism, and 
then had the courage to put Nazis on public trial in the Nuremberg war 
trials because we were strong enough to have a transparent due process 
system. We weren't afraid. And we shouldn't be afraid in resolving this 
conflict in Iraq, in acting with the real strength that means real 
security.
  Now, our brave troops have done everything that we've asked of them. 
They fought through an invasion, and after that, it was an ill advised 
invasion, but then, through the incompetence and mismanagement of this 
administration, they have been left in the quagmire of a civil war.
  And I want to turn now to the words of somebody with far more 
military experience than me, to talk about the effect of what we have 
done here in the Congress tonight. Major General John Batiste, United 
States Army Retired, said, this important legislation sets a new 
direction for Iraq. It acknowledges that America went to war without 
mobilizing the Nation, that our strategy in Iraq has been tragically 
flawed since the invasion in March 2003, that our Army and Marine Corps 
are at the breaking point with little to show for it, and that our 
military, alone, will never establish representative government in 
Iraq. And Major General John Batiste said, the administration got it 
terribly wrong. And I applaud our Congress for stepping up to their 
constitutional responsibilities because this Congress, as Major General 
John Batiste has recognized, unlike the rubber stamp Congresses that 
have preceded us for years now, is finally the accountability Congress. 
We are holding our government accountable by passing the Iraq 
accountability act, which forces the Iraqi government to take 
responsibility for their own stability.
  We are into the fifth year of this war. Hundreds of billions of 
dollars, and still, no progress on reforming the Constitution.
  What about reconciliation? What about all the ministries in the Iraqi 
government fighting amongst themselves? What about the Sunni/Shia 
divide that al-Maliki does not seem to want to face and deal with? The 
Sunnis and Shiites killing each other, and our troops in the middle of 
it.
  So we hold our government accountable to our troops, to our returning 
soldiers and our veterans. This accountability Congress has held 
oversight hearings to investigate government mismanagement and 
corruption in Iraq. We found, for instance, in oversight hearings, that 
this administration shipped $12 billion of cash over to Iraq without 
accounting for it, and gave it away to Iraqi ministries to use as they 
would, without ever asking for a single shred of accounting. No paper 
trail, no nothing. We're restoring accountability to contracting, 
ending the massive waste caused by no bid contracts.
  And the contractors in Iraq, just so we are clear, on this, we now 
know that, in addition to the 150,000 troops, give or take, currently 
in Iraq, there are 126,000 private contractors. And as John Murtha so 
eloquently talked about the floor tonight, we've got a situation where 
our brave soldiers are standing there, they are making $25,000 a year, 
let's say they are pumping gas and doing some security details. And 
next to them there's a private contractor making $80,000 a year doing 
the same job. Some of these private contractors, we heard, are making 
$300,000 a year. That's more than any government official in the United 
States government. And you want to know where our billions and billions 
of dollars have gone.
  So we're restoring some accountability to government with the Iraq 
Accountability Act tonight. We're restoring openness and transparency 
to government, to repair the fabric of our democracy that has been 
undermined in the course of this administration.
  So this President does have a choice to make tonight. And I think of 
the

[[Page H4166]]

words of Zbigniew Brzinski, the former National Security Adviser, who 
called this war an increasingly immoral, futile exercise in 
presidential hubris, because, my friends, I'm sorry to say that the 
President of the United States has said that he's going to veto what 
Congress has passed. He is going to essentially turn his back on the 
will of the American people. He's going to go against the advice of 
retired generals in droves who've come out to talk about the reality. 
And I believe the American people are going to be disappointed in that 
veto because they want a new direction in Iraq. And that is the course 
we have set tonight. I'll kick it back now to Mr. Murphy.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Hodes. The 
three of us are new Members. We came here on that tidal wave of 
increasing popular angst against this war. And this place shouldn't be 
dictated just by what happens in elections, but elections have to mean 
something. When the people get a chance to go out there every 2 years 
and weigh in on the direction of their Federal Government, they have to 
feel, at some level, like what they say matters.

                              {time}  2245

  And, Mr. Hodes, I mean you are right. When they pick up the paper 
whatever day it is going to be when he actually vetoes this, the 
feeling inside, that voter who thought they went out and cast a 
courageous vote for Mr. Altmire or Mr. Hodes or Mr. Murphy who decided 
to make a change when it doesn't happen very often that you have a 
change like this, maybe once every decade or every two decades, well, 
they are going to lose just a little bit of faith in this process. And 
every day that we continue to have an administration that refuses to 
honor where the American people want the course of this war to go, 
which, as we have said over and over again, it is not just the American 
people but it is the American people being backed up by generals, being 
backed up by the foreign policy community, the Iraq Study Group, there 
is a little piece of democracy that dies every day that that happens.
  Let me just bring up an additional topic here. When I got out into 
Baghdad on the day that we were in Baghdad, what we saw was the 
escalation in progress. What the escalation essentially is, is it is 
asking these soldiers who are on their second or third tour of duty 
over there, who would normally do 12-hour shifts patrolling these 
incredibly dangerous streets, trying to dodge sniper fire, trying to 
keep clear of the increasing number of IEDs, roadside bombs, now those 
troops, after the 12-hour shift, aren't going back to safe barracks; 
they are lodging themselves in the neighborhoods, in some of the most 
dangerous, war-torn neighborhoods of Baghdad. They are living in 
bombed-out buildings with little or no electricity or running water, in 
squalid conditions. That is what the escalation is.
  Now, if this was a fresh round of troops, if this was a group of 
young men and women who were there for the first time, maybe you could 
understand putting them in that position. But that is not what this is. 
Twenty-three percent of all the troops who are being deployed right now 
are National Guard and Reserve troops. Eighty-eight percent of those 
National Guard and Reserve troops are so poorly equipped that they are 
rated not ready right now. That is from the Washington Post, about a 
month back.
  We know that the number of Active Duty and Reserve brigades in the 
United States that are considered combat-ready, zero. None of them. We 
have maxed out our military. We have asked, Mr. Hodes, as you said, our 
men and women to do everything we have asked them to do, and we have 
got to start asking ourselves the question, have we asked them to do 
too much?
  One day they are in the middle of a firefight. The next day they are 
sitting down and trying to mediate a dispute between two rival 
neighborhood groups. The day after that they are overseeing the 
construction of a water filtration plant. They are, within a 3-day 
period, being asked to be fighters, diplomats, and civil engineers.
  Having gotten to spend a couple days on the ground with these folks, 
they are by all measure the best people that we could send over there, 
the bravest, the most capable. If there is anyone in this world that 
could do this job, I know it is them. I knew it intuitively from back 
here in the United States. Having spent a few days on the ground, you 
know it from the moment you talk to them. But we have maxed them out.
  And why I try to get here as often as I can to hear Mr. Murtha speak 
here on the floor is because there is no better in talking about this 
subject than Mr. Murtha. He said it here tonight: There is no one more 
in touch with the troops than he is. And our danger is not just in 
asking them something they may not be able to do, but permanently 
damaging the capability of this military going forward.
  Mr. HODES. Madam Speaker, the interesting thing about what this bill 
does, I mean the reality of what it does, is it gives this President an 
opportunity, it gives him a fabulous opportunity, to face reality, as a 
leader should, and understand that he is being given the opportunity 
for a new direction, for a new direction that is tough and smart, and 
smart about our security, because it is designed to make sure that our 
interests in the Middle East are taken care of in a responsible way. 
The American people know that. They want us to be responsible in the 
way we resolve the situation in Iraq.
  Major General Paul Eaton addressed the notion of why this is so 
responsible when he said, ``This bill gives General Petraeus great 
leverage for moving the Iraqi Government down the more disciplined path 
laid out by the Iraq Study Group. The real audience for the timeline 
language is Prime Minister al-Maliki and the elected Government of 
Iraq.'' Because it gives the general, it gives the President, the 
leverage to say, folks, it is time that you stepped up, to say to Prime 
Minister al-Maliki it is time you stepped up. Are you serious about 
reconciliation? Are you serious about the political stability that Iraq 
needs? Are you serious about the economic stability Iraq needs? Are you 
serious about it, or are you just waiting because we are going to be 
there forever? Because right now, the President has made an open-ended 
commitment, and this bill responsibly puts an end to that open-ended 
commitment.
  Now, the folks on the other side of the aisle have said, time and 
time again, that this somehow weakens us because it gives notice to our 
enemy, whoever that may be. They say it is al Qaeda. We are in the 
middle of a civil war. There is some al Qaeda there to be sure. What 
Major General Paul Eaton said is, ``The argument that this bill aids 
the enemy is simply not mature. Nobody on the Earth underestimates the 
United States' capacity for unpredictability. It may further create 
some sense of urgency in the rest of our government, beginning with the 
State Department.''
  Because we have got to ask, where are the diplomats? Where are the 
diplomats? There are some provincial reconciliation teams on the 
ground, working around the country and they are talking about more. But 
where have been the diplomats? Where has been the diplomatic effort 
that everybody acknowledges is really what is necessary to bring some 
stability in the Middle East?
  Why did it take Speaker Pelosi to go to Syria to begin some dialogue? 
Because everybody recognizes that we have got to talk to people, even 
those who are our enemies in this complex world in the 21st century.
  So this bill gives the President, it gives the generals, the leverage 
to forge a new direction.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Speaker, I want to yield to Mr. 
Altmire in a second.
  But let me just underscore this to say none of us are happy to be in 
this situation. Myself, I think that this is the best course. I think 
that we need to set in law a sense of when our commitment is going to 
end there. The only way we will finally complete the training of our 
military and our Armed Forces within the Iraqi community is to give 
them a sense of when they will have to stand up for themselves.
  Now, at the same time, there is no perfect option. In fact, there may 
be no good option here. We all have to admit at some level, Republicans 
and Democrats, that we have gotten ourselves into a mess here that 
there is no pretty way out of. And that is part of what government 
hasn't been pretty good about talking about. This administration, it is 
all about black and white to

[[Page H4167]]

them. It is good or evil. It is right or wrong.
  There is a lot of gray, and we created most of that gray by being the 
bull in the china shop there. But what we put forward today, what the 
majority of this caucus supported this afternoon and this evening is 
not the perfect, and it is probably not even the good, but it is the 
best that we can do in a very bad situation. And it is certainly the 
best that we can do by the brave men and women who are fighting.
  So as proud as we are, I think, Mr. Hodes and Mr. Altmire, standing 
up today and finally getting our head out of the sand and putting some 
direction in what has been a directionless conflict, at the same time 
it is a sobering day because we all admit, especially as new Members 
who didn't participate in the lead-up to this very troubling time, that 
getting ourselves out of it isn't going to be an easy process and it is 
not going to be a very brief process.
  With that, I will turn it over to Mr. Altmire.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I thank the gentleman from Connecticut for yielding.
  I want to talk about what these charts mean that the gentleman from 
New Hampshire is holding up next to where he is speaking. These are 
examples of generals, people who have seen firsthand what is happening 
on the ground in Afghanistan, people with the utmost military 
experience, who have said clearly, without ambiguity, that the 
President's course of action is wrong. And the course of action that we 
took today here in this House is endorsed by these generals. And this 
is a further example of the President's not listening to anybody but 
himself and his very, very close circle of advisers, any of whom, if 
they differ from him, find themselves reassigned or out on the street. 
And for some reason, the President doesn't listen to his generals. He 
doesn't listen to the Iraq Study Group.
  You will recall, and I would like to remind my colleagues, that he 
said, when the Iraq Study Group formed and was going about their 
business of studying this situation and coming up with their report, 
that he was going to pay attention to what they said and take some of 
their advice. Well, unfortunately, the report came out and was promptly 
discarded by the administration, and they did nothing about what was in 
the Iraq Study Group.
  Now, some of the things that were talked about that we should engage 
in diplomacy with countries like Iran and Syria, we know where the 
President stands on that. He is not going to change with that. The Iraq 
Study Group recommended that we do set a timeline on our activities to 
increase our leverage with the Iraqi Government, as I talked about 
earlier. But the President chose to discard that. He chose to discard 
what his generals on the ground said. Those that disagreed were 
reassigned, and some of them now, as Mr. Hodes has pointed out, are 
saying that what we are doing is the right course of action. But what 
is most important and what is most relevant for what we did today in 
this House, the President is ignoring the American people.
  We have all seen the polls about where the American public feels 
about this. But we shouldn't legislate by polls; we should legislate 
based on we are elected Representatives of the American people. There 
are 435 districts in this House, each of whom has a voice, and it is 
our responsibility as Representatives to go back into our districts, 
listen to what our constituents have to say on these issues of critical 
importance, return here on a day like today, debate the issue the 
entire day, come back at 11 o'clock at night and we are still debating 
the issue. But we took a vote and we had to put it on the line, yes or 
no, where do you come down on this issue? The Congress has spoken. At 
least the House has spoken. The Senate is going to speak in the next 
day or two.
  And I want to make one thing clear. Let there be there be no 
discussion about this. If the Senate passes the conference report, 
which we expect, and sends this bill to the President, as Mr. Hodes 
said, he has a decision to make. He can either sign that bill and 
provide the troops the funding that they need to continue the mission, 
or veto the bill and deny them the support that they need. That is his 
choice. The Congress has spoken on that.
  So when any Member of this House has one of their constituents come 
up to them and say, well, when are you going to give our troops the 
money that they need to continue this fight? Well, we did it today. The 
answer to that question is we did it today. The Senate is going to do 
it tomorrow, perhaps the following day.
  Then the President has a decision to make. And if he chooses to veto 
that bill, the troops' funding will be delayed. But that won't be 
because of us. That will be because of a decision that was made down 
the street at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time, I want 
to make sure everybody knows that there are no hard lines in the sand 
in this House. And, in fact, the bill that we voted on today is 
different from the bill that we voted on about 2 weeks ago. In fact, 
what this House voted on, and what many Members insisted upon several 
weeks ago, was a hard deadline in the sand that said that we had to be 
out of Iraq by next spring or, at the latest, next fall. And many of us 
stood up and said, for the reasons we talked about tonight, that in 
order to get the Iraqis to finally stand up for themselves, we have got 
to give them that sense.
  The bill that we voted on today in an effort to bring the President 
to the table, to get him to sign a bill that puts every dollar he asked 
for, and, more for troops and veterans was a goal. It was a goal. Now, 
there are a lot of us who wanted to see more than a goal. All of this 
is an effort in compromise. But that goal even is apparently 
objectionable to this President. And I have a feeling that this House 
will move again and will try to come up with yet another means of 
resetting our policy and our course in Iraq that is acceptable to this 
President.

                              {time}  2300

  So if anybody has any idea out there that the House of 
Representatives is just saying X and the President is just saying Y, 
no, we're trying to make that effort. And you know what? People are 
going to look in the paper this morning and see a vote that has a lot 
of Democrats voting for it and a lot of Republicans voting against it. 
Lest they think that that's been the case day in and day out here, in 
fact, it's been the exception to the rule in how we have conducted 
ourselves in this House. The 100 hours agenda, making changes on our 
economic policy, our health care policy, our national security policy, 
our homeland security policy had record numbers of Republicans. We 
stood together and we have stood together on everything from the 
minimum wage to stem cell research to even the budget.
  So we have made great progress, I think, in this House on bringing 
back together some of that partisan divide. Lest people look up at the 
vote that we took tonight and think that we didn't honor our pledge to 
really start to bring that back together, I think we have in large 
part.
  And I think that's important to say because I know, Mr. Hodes, that 
as important as it is to the new Members to get Iraq right, to get 
health care right, to get energy right, it's also really important for 
us to start bridging some of the gaps here. And it pains us when these 
things do hit party lines, but on something as important as Iraq, the 
vote is what the vote is. And we'll get back to building those bridges 
as soon as we get beyond it.
  Mr. HODES. I thank the gentleman.
  You know, I was hopeful that we could bring both sides of this House 
together on this bill because our goal is a common goal, to achieve 
real strength and real security for America.
  We all honor our troops. We have a difference in opinion, apparently 
along party lines primarily, about how best to achieve that. Our 
friends on the other side of the aisle, and the President, apparently, 
think that an open-ended commitment and putting more troops into a city 
of 7 million people into a civil war is the way to do it. We believe 
that there is a smarter way to help the Iraqis step up and to achieve 
that security.
  Let me just talk briefly about what this bill does, because it really 
does three important things. First, it adopts the military's own 
guidelines for troop readiness, training and equipment. We've been 
sending our soldiers without the right equipment, without adequate 
training, and without enough

[[Page H4168]]

rest between deployments. They're stretched. They've been deployed two 
times, three times, four times. The length of their deployments have 
been stretched. And we've adopted the military's own guidelines to say 
that before troops are sent to Iraq they must be properly equipped, 
they've got to be trained, they've got to be ready to go.
  I can't understand why the President would veto a bill that adopts 
the military's own guidelines for troop readiness. Because by his veto, 
he will therefore be rejecting the military's guidelines for troop 
readiness. He will be saying to the American people, I am perfectly 
satisfied with sending troops that aren't ready into combat.
  The second thing this does is it fully funds the troops, as we have 
said. In fact, it provides $4 billion more than the President asked 
directly to the troops. So if he vetoes the bill, he will essentially 
be saying I'm vetoing, I'm rejecting funding for our troops. I am 
rejecting the funding that he asked for. I don't understand how he will 
do that, but that's what his veto will mean.
  And finally, we provide a responsible way to redeploy that actually 
answers the concerns that people had about flexibility for our military 
commanders on the ground. Because what we do is we set a date based on 
benchmarks for the Iraqis that the President himself set out in a 
January 10 speech for the beginning of a strategic redeployment, and we 
give the military commanders the flexibility on the other end to reach 
the target goals. So if the President vetoes his own announced 
benchmarks for the Iraqis, I just don't understand it because he will 
be vetoing what he said in a speech to the American people on January 
10 as his idea about what the Iraqis ought to be doing for themselves. 
He set the benchmarks, and now he said that he intends to veto his own 
benchmarks. It's beyond me to understand why he's going to veto what he 
said he wants to do.
  If I can just go on for one more moment. I want to talk about some of 
the other money in this bill because this is really important. People 
have complained, I've heard it at home, about what they think is excess 
domestic spending in this bill. But here's what this bill does in terms 
of funding that is related to supporting our troops.
  This bill provides $3 billion more for mine-resistant ambush-
protected vehicles for troops in Iraq.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. That doesn't sound like pork.
  Mr. HODES. That's not pork. This bill provides $2 billion more for a 
Strategic Reserve Readiness Fund to meet the troops' readiness needs.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. That doesn't sound like pork either.
  Mr. HODES. That's not pork either.
  It provides $1.1 billion more for needed military housing. Does that 
sound like pork?
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. That doesn't sound like pork to me, Mr. 
Hodes.
  Mr. HODES. The bill honors our returning veterans by providing $2.1 
billion more for military health care than the President requested, 
including $900 million for post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic 
brain injury care and research, and $661 million to prevent health care 
fee increases for our troops. Because what they are now facing under 
this President's policies is getting sent off to war to fight for their 
country and coming home to find that their health insurance costs more, 
that the military health system is too overloaded to take care of them, 
and that the veterans' system has been overloaded beyond capacity.
  Now, if the President vetoes these increases for the veterans and 
wounded warriors that his policies have created, it will be something 
that I don't understand and I don't think the American people are going 
to understand. And so he has a challenge in front of him. He has a 
challenge and a choice to make. And maybe between now and when this 
bill hits his desk, he will have one of those moments on the road to 
Damascus and decide that he will face the reality and do right by our 
troops, do right by the American people, do right by this country and 
set a new direction in Iraq.
  I will kick it back to you, Mr. Murphy.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. We've got a few minutes left, so I'm going 
to throw it over for some closing remarks to Mr. Altmire.
  Mr. ALTMIRE. I wanted to change the subject here just momentarily 
here, if I could, here at the end and just mention something, because 
unfortunately, since we're not in session on Monday due to the 
unfortunate funeral that many of our colleagues are going to be 
attending for one of our colleagues, I wanted to mention the fact that 
Monday is going to be Paul Hayes, the House reading Clerk's last day. 
Paul has been here for 20 years, and to many viewers around the country 
of C-SPAN, he is the voice of the House of Representatives. I was going 
to do a 1 minute on Monday, but I will just do it today because we're 
not going to be in session on Monday and just say what an honor it has 
been for me, Paul, to be able to spend a few months as a Member with 
you here.
  I was a staffer, as Mr. Murphy knows, on Capitol Hill for 6 years in 
the early 1990s, and we used to watch Paul Hayes at work. And it has 
just been a great experience for me to come back as a Member of 
Congress and briefly be able to, for about 4 months, to be able to 
serve and work with you, Paul. So I just wanted to say congratulations, 
and we wish you all the best.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Well, it pains me to admit that I spent 
far too much of my life watching this House from a distance. And so I 
share those thoughts and I am so glad Mr. Altmire would bring that up 
on this day.
  With that, before we end our hour, we're going to allow our honored 
guest, who we hope is joining us for the first of many visits with the 
30-Somethings.
  As our veteran Members abandon us, our new Members step up. And Mr. 
Hodes, if you might inform folks how they might find us via e-mail and 
via the Web.
  Mr. HODES. Well, as I said at the beginning of the hour, Mr. Murphy 
and Mr. Altmire, I'm on the ``something'' side of 30, but I am glad to 
be with you because I am hoping that we, together, have brought an 
energy to this Congress that really has set a new tone and will help us 
set a new direction for this country, not just on the war on Iraq, but 
on health care, on energy, on education and all the policies that the 
American people want us to get to work on and we've been working hard 
on.
  Before we go, I do want to say that Speaker Pelosi's 30-Something 
Working Group can be e-mailed at [email protected]. The 
30-Somethings, whom I am now a proud guest, being on the something 
side, can be visited, and here is the Web site address on this chart, 
www.speaker.gov/30something/index.html.
  So I invite everybody who has been working tonight to visit the 30-
Something Web site for information on what the agenda for America is 
that Democrats have been working on. And I thank you for the 
opportunity to be with you.
  Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Thank you very much. I thank the Speaker 
for giving us this opportunity once again.

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