[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 12130]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



 DEMOCRAT LEADERSHIP STILL OUT OF TOUCH AND STILL CLEARLY ANTI-MILITARY

  (Mr. KINGSTON asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. KINGSTON. Madam Speaker, today we have before us the defense 
reauthorization bill, and it is a very important bill in that it 
reverses the trend of massive defense cuts.
  Now it is interesting, as we go into the debate, actually on the eve 
of the debate, we have the Democrat Majority Leader speaking basically 
the Democrat policy on defense which was we have got to have a 
combination of taking money, and I am going to paraphrase it, but when 
he says taking it out, taking money out of defense and raising revenue, 
raising taxes. We can argue about how to do that, closing loopholes or 
even raising taxes to do it, but the point is here we have a defense, 
and I will show my colleagues another chart which traces defense 
spending under the Clinton administration, particularly since 1993, how 
it has been cut massively during the period of time that we have had 
increased deployments, we have had equipment that lacks spare parts, we 
need modernization, and we are losing lots of good soldiers because the 
quality of life has gone down so much. But despite this decrease, the 
Majority Leader of the Democrat party is saying again we need to 
squeeze it out of defense, we need to cut defense spending, and this in 
the face of a President who is selling missile technology to China.
  Madam Speaker, it does not make sense.
  I hope people will support this bill, and I hope that we can get the 
Democrats to join us. I believe that we will get a lot of Democrats 
with us, but it is too bad that the Democrat leadership is still out of 
touch and still clearly anti-military.

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