[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 13343-13344]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                CONGRESSIONAL INABILITY TO PASS THE NDAA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Speier) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. SPEIER. Mr. Speaker, this is a sage-grouse. I found out that the 
sage-grouse have poor eyesight, so they often collide with barbed wire 
fences and other obstructions that are difficult to see. And these 
collisions are often fatal.
  But the sage-grouse looks like a keen-eyed hawk compared to Congress. 
That is because the sage-grouse recently collided with the National 
Defense Authorization Act, and the nearsighted bird won. Hopefully this 
time it won't be fatal.
  We were supposed to vote to send the NDAA to the President this week, 
but a disagreement between the House and the Senate Republicans about 
the sage-grouse got egg all over the deal. That is right, a bill that 
authorizes over $600 billion in spending on wartime operations, weapons 
acquisition, servicemember benefits, and many other provisions critical 
to the defense of our country was taken down by a bird. But unlike the 
plane that landed in the Hudson River, Congress doesn't seem to have a 
Captain Sully to rescue it from bird-induced mayhem.
  Don't get me wrong. The NDAA has many problems. It redirects billions 
in critical funding towards a program the Defense Department does not 
want. It sidesteps the Bipartisan Budget Act compromise by requiring 
supplemental funding just to keep the Pentagon running. It contains a 
myriad of poison pill riders, from allowing contractors to engage in 
discrimination against the LGBTQ employees, to releasing tens of 
thousands of handguns into our communities with no background checks.

[[Page 13344]]

  All of these reasons are why I voted against the bill in committee 
and on the House floor. Nonetheless, the conference report is a 
compromise between the Senate and the House on complex issues ranging 
from funding operations against ISIS to military healthcare reform, a 
compromise on everything but this pesky bird.
  House Republicans stubbornly refuse to remove language that would 
prohibit the sage-grouse from being placed on the Endangered Species 
List, despite the fact that no one is trying to list it. Placing an 
animal on the Endangered Species List is a scientific decision not 
within the purview of Congress, and the administration has promised not 
to list the bird anyway, thanks to a compromise conservation plan. So 
the provision that is holding up the entire bill not only blatantly 
prioritizes politics over national security policy, it is legally 
meaningless.
  I think Speaker Ryan put it best earlier this month when he said that 
playing politics over the NDAA is ``shameless, and it threatens more 
than five decades of bipartisan cooperation to enact a national defense 
bill for our troops. The men and women who defend our country deserve 
better.''
  Well, Mr. Speaker, then your party is chicken for prioritizing 
talking points over national security.
  The sage-grouse is such an important issue to House Republicans that 
it makes you wonder what they will do next to contain the serious 
national security threat. Perhaps we will soon hear calls to build a 
wall on the Canadian border to prevent sage-grouse from sending their 
chicks across the border, even though some, I assume, are good 
hatchlings.
  We may then hear about a plan to prevent sage-grouse from entering 
the country altogether until we find out what is going on. Maybe the 
Republicans will ban sage-grouse mating dances as breeding grounds 
for--well, if not terrorism, then, at least more sage-grouse.
  But, seriously, colleagues, is this really what our constituents are 
most concerned about?
  It is time to focus on passing a bill that provides accountability on 
defense spending to taxpayers and is in line with the Bipartisan Budget 
Act. Our inability to overcome this pointless provision is just further 
evidence that this Congress is for or, in this case, against the birds.

                          ____________________