[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 20]
[House]
[Page 29852]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      UNPREPAREDNESS OF U.S. ARMY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Tancredo). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, last week, The Washington Post ran a front-
page story that said the U.S. Army has rated 2 of its 10 divisions 
unprepared for war due to the ``strain of open-ended troop commitments 
in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere.''
  This unpreparedness is the result of spending so many billions in 
Kosovo, where we made the situation many times worse by going in than 
it was before we started bombing. This unpreparedness is the result of 
spending many billions in Bosnia, where we had U.S. troops giving 
rabies shots to Bosnian dogs and where the military's greatest problem 
was boredom of the troops. This unpreparedness is the result of 
spending billions in Haiti, where, according to The Washington Post, we 
had our troops picking up garbage and settling domestic disputes. This 
unpreparedness is the result of spending even now, according to the 
Associated Press, $1 million a day on a forgotten war in Iraq that is 
doing us no good at all.
  In fact, almost all of these foreign misadventures, in addition to 
weakening our military and costing U.S. taxpayers many billions of 
dollars, all of these misadventures are making new enemies for this 
Nation all of the time. Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, 
and billions and billions and billions of U.S. taxpayers' money, all 
spent at a time when we are still almost $6 trillion in debt, and all 
spent where there was absolutely no threat to U.S. national security.
  In addition to these problems is the fact that our constitution is 
being ignored. Syndicated columnist Doug Bandow wrote ``When the U.S. 
attacked Yugoslavia earlier this year, it inaugurated war against 
another sovereign state that had not attacked or threatened America or 
an American ally. The President, and the President alone, made the 
decision. The constitutional requirement that only Congress shall 
declare war is obviously a dead letter. Yet the administration's 
embarrassing bungling in Kosovo illustrates just why the Framers 
intended that the decision to go be nested in the legislative.'', 
according to Mr. Bandow.
  He also quoted Abraham Lincoln, who said ``Kings had always been 
involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending that the 
good of the people was the object.'' Lincoln added that the 
constitutional requirement that only Congress could declare war came 
about because war was ``the most oppressive of Kingly oppressions; and 
(the Framers) naturally resolved to so frame the Constitution that no 
one man should hold the power of bringing this suppression on us.''
  James Madison wrote that ``The Constitution supposes, what the 
history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the 
branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it. It has 
accordingly, with studied care, vested the question of war in the 
legislature.''
  Of course very few people seem to care that we so routinely violate 
our constitution today.
  The Christian Science Monitor had a special section last year showing 
that there were little wars going on in over 40 places around the 
world. If we try to stop them all, we can forget about Social Security, 
Medicare, the national parks, and almost everything else the Federal 
Government does.
  Do we now go into Chechnya and stop the Russians from killing people 
there? Do we start now attacking the Albanians, who have been killing 
the Serbs in Kosovo now that the shoe is on the other foot? Of course 
not. We only go where CNN tells us to by whichever hot spot they are 
playing up at the moment.
  We need to stop turning our military into international social 
workers. We need to restore our constitutional form of government, and 
we need to stop sending troops in and bombing people where there is no 
real threat to our own national security. And we need to stop spending 
so many billions of hard-earned tax dollars in military misadventures 
when so many families have to have both mother and father working so 
that one can pay all the Federal, State and local taxes imposed upon 
them.
  One other unrelated topic, Mr. Speaker, which also shows that the 
Federal Government is simply too big, is the report just out that the 
wife of a member of the other body has been paid $2.5 million by just 
one company over the last 6 months in lobbying fees. When the Federal 
Government was much smaller, no one was paid $2.5 million for 6 months 
of lobbying, especially by just one company.
  It seems to me that it should be wrong for the wife of a Senator or 
for any one person to be paid $2.5 million in just 6 months to lobby 
any department or agency of the Federal Government. This is the type of 
thing that goes on thanks to liberals who have made our Federal 
Government so big and have given it so much money that it is simply now 
out of control.

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