[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 116 (Thursday, July 11, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4782-S4783]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 China

  Mr. WICKER. Madam President, I call to the Senators' attention today 
a disturbing article in the June 29, 2019, issue of The Economist, on 
pages 36 and 37. It is about the military buildup in China and the way 
it affects the United States. It says:

       Xi Jinping wants China's armed forces to be ``world class'' 
     by 2050. He has done more to achieve this than any of his 
     predecessors.

  I will quote from the lead of this article in The Economist.

       Over the past decade, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) 
     has been lavished with money and arms. China's military 
     spending rose by 83 percent in real terms between 2009 and 
     2018, by far the largest growth spurt in any big country. The 
     splurge has enabled China to deploy precision missiles and 
     anti-satellite weapons that challenge American supremacy in 
     the western Pacific. China's leader, Xi Jinping, says his 
     ``Chinese dream'' includes a ``dream of a strong armed 
     forces''. That, he says, involves ``modernising'' the PLA by 
     2035 and making it ``world-class''--in other words, America-
     beating--by mid-century. He has been making a lot of 
     progress.

  In the second column of this article, it goes on to say:

       He has done more in the past three years to reform the PLA 
     than any leader since Deng Xiaoping.

  This quote is not from some advocate of defense spending but is from 
one of the leading publications, The Economist.
  I say to my colleagues, we need to be mindful of the threat that is 
arising to the United States from around the globe--not only from 
China, as I have just read, but also from Vladimir Putin's Russia, from 
Iran, and from international terrorism. There is a deteriorating 
security situation in almost every sector of the globe. The fact that 
the United States has always been super supreme and able to defend the 
free peoples of this world is being challenged. We can no longer assume 
that any war would never be a fair fight. That has been the goal of the 
United States if we have to go to war. And we want to avoid war. But 
the best way, in our judgment, as a national strategy down through the 
decades, to avoid conflict of any kind is to make sure that if America 
ever gets in a fight, it will not be a fair fight; it will be a fight 
where we have overwhelming superiority, so no one will dare challenge 
the sea lanes and the freedom that we stand for in the United States of 
America. That is being challenged today.
  I would submit to you that it is a good time for the United States to 
point out that we passed the National Defense Authorization Act--the 
NDAA--on a huge bipartisan basis. It was 80-something votes to 8. It is 
just unbelievable, the way we came together under the leadership of 
Chairman Inhofe and Ranking Member Reed, his Democratic counterpart, 
working together as professionals, as legislators, and as Americans to 
send a strong statement that we need to go from the $700 billion that 
was spent last fiscal year to $750 billion to give our troops the pay 
raise they need, to recognize the sacrifice they have made, and to give 
our military--the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines--the tools they 
need, the equipment they need, and the innovation and manufacturing 
they need to get us where we need to go.
  We went through a 7- or 8-year period when--we ought to all be 
ashamed because our fingerprints are all on it, those of us who were in 
office at the time. The distinguished Presiding Officer was not a 
Member of the Senate at that time, but those of us who were, we got our 
fingerprints on it, Republicans and Democrats. Somehow, try though we 
might, say what we might, we were unable to prevent sequestration from 
happening--an unthinkable result. The military branches couldn't 
believe this was happening and couldn't believe Congress would be so 
irresponsible, but somehow we were.
  We have righted the ship over the past 2 years. It would be 
unthinkable to me, my fellow Americans, after making the progress to 
get back on the right track and return to responsible defense spending 
and responsible stewardship of our national security, if somehow we 
heeded some voices we have been hearing in Washington, DC, and around 
the country during the past few days about a continuing resolution, 
perhaps--maybe a continuing resolution of an entire year. The thinking 
there is, well, we just do a continuing resolution, and that will 
amount to level spending, and we can live with that.
  I just left a hearing on the confirmation of GEN Mark Milley as the 
next, I hope, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I asked him 
about that. Would a continuing resolution simply be level spending, and 
might we be able to live with that? And he absolutely made the point 
which we all know if we study the law. It is way more than level 
spending. It stops innovation. It stops the new starts. It stops 
everything that we planned in the NDAA, which we passed with an 
overwhelming bipartisan vote, and it makes it against the law for the 
shipbuilders to do anything new and for the people working on our next-
generation aircraft to do anything new. It stops them in their tracks. 
It creates uncertainty in every branch of the military. And then we 
have to pay millions and billions to get back going again. It is an 
unthinkable result. Surely we can avoid that as Republicans and 
Democrats.
  Let me quote now-retired Secretary Mattis. When he was asked about 
this very subject on a recent occasion, Secretary Mattis said this:

       I cannot overstate the impact to our troops' morale from 
     all this uncertainty. The combination of rapidly changing 
     technology, the negative impact on military readiness 
     resulting from the longest continuous stretch of combat in 
     our Nation's history, and insufficient funding have created 
     an overstretched and under-resourced military.

  According to Secretary Mattis, ``Under continuing resolutions, we 
actually lose ground.''
  We need a budget deal. We need a
2-year budget deal, as we have had in the past. Give our defense 
leaders, the Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries, as well as the ones 
who put on the uniform and agreed, for a career, to put themselves in 
harm's way--give them the certainty they need in order to defend 
against the threats The Economist talked about and the threats General 
Mattis talked about. Give them that certainty.
  A new CR--a continuing resolution--would prevent us from having that 
certainty. It would delay maintenance for the Harry S. Truman aircraft 
carrier. It would prevent a guided missile frigate program we already 
authorized from even starting. This would happen September 30 if we go 
to a continuing resolution. It would cripple research and development, 
and it would prevent the Pentagon from aligning its funding with 
upcoming priorities.
  We need to realize a fact of life around here. I didn't exactly get 
my way in the election last November. If I had my druthers, the House 
of Representatives would have remained in Republican hands, with a 
Republican Speaker and a Republican Chair. The voters, in their wisdom, 
decided to vote for divided government last November.
  Our team was elected to continue leadership in the U.S. Senate. The 
Democratic team was elected to leadership in the House of 
Representatives. And I can assure you, if I were writing a defense 
appropriations bill, which is half of discretionary spending, and all 
of the other appropriations bills, which is so-called nondefense 
discretionary, it would look far different from the bill

[[Page S4783]]

Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposes to write. I can assure you that it would 
look different and that we would have less domestic spending. But the 
fact of life is that Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, is the one 
who guides legislation here in the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat 
from California, is the one who guides legislation on the floor of the 
House of Representatives, and if we get a bill passed, we are going to 
have to get a compromise bill passed. If anybody within the sound of my 
voice doesn't realize this, they don't understand government. They 
don't understand the dynamics that have taken place since Philadelphia 
in 1776 and Philadelphia again in 1787, where give-and-take had to 
occur, but we moved things along for the greater good.
  We can come to an agreement, or we can show ourselves to Vladimir 
Putin's Russia as unable to govern adequately, and we can show 
ourselves to Xi Jinping's China as unable to make the tough decisions 
to protect Americans. We have that choice, and we have a willingness on 
this side of the aisle and on the other side of the aisle. I was with 
some of my Democratic and Republican friends from the other body just 
yesterday. I think there is the willingness there. We are going to have 
to have an agreement that the administration will sign on to because 
the President's signature has to be affixed to this.
  Now is the time--July 11, 2019--to get this decision made, before we 
leave for August. I would hope we wouldn't leave for August until we 
get that number agreed to. We come back after Labor Day, and then it is 
brinksmanship, and then suddenly it is shutdown city, and that is being 
threatened. Russia knows this, the Iranian leadership knows this, and 
China knows this. Let's do it now.
  So I call on the Democratic and Republican leadership in the House, I 
call on our leadership, and I call on our President to get down to 
business in the next few days. Let's go ahead and make this decision 
that we know will eventually have to be made, make a responsible 
decision and send a message to the rest of the world that we intend to 
take care of our security.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, first of all, let me say that I couldn't 
agree more with the Senator from Mississippi, Mr. Wicker, than I do. 
His points are exactly right. A democracy is finding a way forward. It 
is not finding your way forward necessarily. It is obviously finding as 
much of your way forward as you can find. But it is finding a way 
forward.
  Clearly, a top priority of the Federal Government is to defend the 
country. It is my top priority. I think I would be safe in suggesting 
it is Senator Wicker's top priority. And it is an important priority 
for our friends on the other side, but it may not be quite the same 
priority on the other side.
  For this to work, the House and the Senate have to work together and 
the White House has to work together to come up with just that spending 
number. Once we have the number that we are going to spend, having the 
debate on the floor is suddenly possible.
  I am fully in agreement with that, but I want to talk for a few 
minutes today about a program that we need to extend for a short period 
of time to get it extended to the end of this spending year.