Duncan Hunter

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. I will not offer any one-liners, but I have to say that this situation does beg for some one-liners. You could actually get a twofer. If you are an illegal alien and you are driving to vote and you are pursued by the Border Patrol, you will not only be able to cast your ballot but also enjoy a healthy lawsuit against the Border Patrol or a sheriff's department with a good chance for recompense.

Mr. HUNTER. We have lost several members of the bar in California. They were backed over by a van carrying illegal aliens. I am being facetious. Actually, they usually wait for the van to stop before they get out and offer their services.

Mr. HUNTER. Is that one of your relatives?

Mr. HUNTER. Absolutely.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, before we totally leave the missile area, I just wanted to flesh out the question the gentleman from Arizona asked about how we are treating Israel with respect to building a missile defense as opposed to our own people. The Israelis are surrounded by Arab neighbors who want to launch ballistic missiles at Israel. In 1987, the Israelis were trying to develop a fighter, a craft called the Lavi aircraft. A number of us on the armed services program signed a letter that I drafted and Curt Weldon signed it, a number of Members who were still, Hal Rogers of Kentucky signed it, a number of members who are on the Committee on Armed Services today, and we said to the Israelis, do not build a fighter aircraft because a lot of nations make fighter aircraft. But there is one thing that no western nations build, and that is a defense against incoming ballistic missiles. We think that your program, your coproduction program with the United States should not be fighter aircraft, it should be a defense against missiles. And the reason we think that is because we think in the near future, we wrote this in 1987 to Mr. Rabin, we said we think in the near future you will be attacked with Russian made ballistic missiles coming from a neighboring Arab state. And it was somewhat prophetic. We predicted the state might be Syria. It ended up instead coming from Saddam Hussein. But they were attacked by Russian-made ballistic missiles coming from another country. The Israelis are very practical people. They live on a little postage stamp of land. They are very vulnerable. And they realize that they live in an age of missiles. When their Billy Mitchells tell them something, they act. So they said, we need a defense. So they started, they embarked upon the production of the Arrow missile defense program. That is a defensive missile that when an incoming missile is launched at one of their cities will go up and intercept that missile and destroy it. This President has signed on wholeheartedly in speeches to leaders in Israel to people that support the existence of the Israeli State, he has said, and properly so, I stand foursquare behind your program to defend against incoming ballistic missiles that might hurt people in Israel. All we are asking him to do with the Defend America Act is to sign on for the same program for Americans. We want basically the same thing that we provide and are providing for the people of Israel. Nothing more, nothing less.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. The difference between the gentleman who is standing in the well and a member of the Knesset is that he can say, the gentleman from Israel can say, my President is defending me against missile attacks, and you have to tell your constituents, my President is not defending me against missile attacks.

Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman is absolutely right. We can build a missile defense system for less than 1 percent of the annual defense budget. I might add, the annual defense budget has been reduced by $100 billion under what it was when Ronald Reagan faced down the Soviet Union in the 1980s. But for roughly $5 billion, that is the estimate of Dr. Perry, Mr. Clinton's Secretary of Defense, we can build this defensive system; $5 billion is less than our Aegis destroyer program. It is less than our submarine program. It is less than our bomber program. It is less than our F-22 program. And it is the only thing that will stop incoming ballistic missiles. We need that system. The Defend America Act that the gentleman is cosponsoring, that Mr. Kingston is cosponsoring and that Mr. Spence, the chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, Mr. Livingston, chairman of Appropriations, and our Speaker Newt Gingrich are sponsoring, will be on the floor shortly. Every single Member of this Congress, especially those who all signed on to the Defend America Act after Desert Storm, after the Scud attacks, should sign onto this bill and vote for it.

Mr. HUNTER. The gentleman is asking the question that many Americans have asked or believe they have answered for themselves and believe that we can defend against an incoming ballistic missile attack. I have had a focus group where my constituents said, yes, we think we are defended. Why would not our Government defend us against ballistic missiles? And we had to tell them no, you are not defended. So the answer is no. And Mr. Perry was very honest. The Secretary of Defense is honest when you ask him a direct question. He said no we cannot stop a single incoming ballistic missile coming into an American city.

Mr. HUNTER. Precisely.

Mr. HUNTER. He did have one vote and that was Douglas MacArthur. And, incidentally, I was trying to tell that story today, and our good friend Charles Bass looked up and said, ``I know. He is my uncle.'' So we do have among us the great nephew of Billy Mitchell, Charlie Bass.

Mr. HUNTER. We had a number of Armed Services hearings this year, or national security hearings in the Committee on National Security, and we had the Joint Chiefs before us, and we had the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Clinton's Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry, before us. I asked all of them a question to lead off the hearing, and I tried to keep fairly consistent and put it to them early on in each hearing, and I asked Mr. Perry, Dr. Perry, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, this question: Do we have the ability in the United States to stop a single incoming ballistic missile coming into one of our cities? And the answer that is on the record for everybody to read is, no, we do not have the ability to stop a single incoming ballistic missile. Now, I think it is kind of significant that he would say that this year, because after the gulf war, when we had so many of our soldiers who were injured by the Scud missiles that Saddam Hussein launched at us, people in this Chamber and people in the Senate went into a frenzy, and we immediately passed a resolution that said we shall have a defense against a limited ballistic missile attack against the United States by 1996. We said that right after the gulf war in 1992. Well, it is now 1996 and we have nothing to defend the American people against incoming ballistic missiles. Now, it is true that the Russian empire, the Soviet empire has been broken up, and Belarus and Kazakhstan and the Ukraine and Russia are not separate states, but the Russians still maintain a very strong strategic system. They have ICBM's, SS-18's, they have SLBM's which are their missiles launched from submarines, and, of course, they have their bomber aircraft. But many other nations are now developing missiles. We live in an age of missiles. The Chinese are developing long-rang missiles. Some of them are targeted at American cities. We raised a fuss over China intimidating Taiwan just before their elections. Remember, the Chinese started shooting missiles over Taiwan to scare them. One of the Chinese diplomats said to one of our diplomats, we hope the United States does not decide to back Taiwan too strongly. We think that they will prize Los Angeles more than they will Taiwan. Now, that was a direct threat of a missile attack. And perhaps a missile attack would never come from china, but the fact that they were using the threat of a missile attack that we know we cannot defend against as a means of pushing their foreign policy and keeping us from protecting our friends is a very dark day in American diplomatic history. The North Koreans now are building what is known as a Taepo Dong II missile. We have seen pictures of it. Our intelligence people know about it. It has between a 4,000- and 6,000-kilometer range, and a kilometer is about a thousand meters. That means that that weapon system, with a light load, a biological weapons load or a chemical load will be able to reach Hawaii and Alaska, which, the last time I looked, were part of the United States. We are not doing anything under this President to build a defense against incoming ballistic missiles. So on the defense bill last year, and the gentleman in the well from Arizona, who is a great supporter of national security, and the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston], both supported very strongly the Republican position that said to the President build and deploy by the year 2003, it is about 7 years, and it will take about that long if we start right now, a defense against a limited attack of nuclear weapons, of ICBMs. Ballistic missiles. Well, the President vetoed the defense bill and he vetoed it for two stated reasons. One was the reason Mr. Kingston spoke of; that he wanted to reserve the right to turn American troops over to the United Nations in time of conflict when he wanted to do that; and, second, he vetoed it because he did not want to build a defense against ballistic missiles. So we have repackaged that directive that we think is very, very important. And I think this is just as important. It is as important that we recognize that we live in an age of missiles, as when Billy Mitchell taught us in the 1920's by sinking those battleships with aircraft, that we lived then in an age of air power. There was a major constituency in Washington, DC, with its head in the sand that said, we do not ever want to believe that we have moved out of the age of naval power. We do not want to accept that we live in the age of air power. They wanted to court-martial Billy Mitchell, and we did court-martial him, I believe, in 1925.

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman would yield, I want to bring up one other subject for just a minute, if the gentleman will indulge me.

Mr. HUNTER. You know what this is like? This is like the Democratic leadership yelling fire in a theater that is crowded with senior citizens, making them stampede toward the door. It is absolutely unconscionable.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for placing the question so well. I will tell you what I think has been the biggest faux pas, the biggest mistake, the biggest blunder that liberals have made on the floor this year and have made in speeches throughout the country, and this goes all the way from the White House right down to the people that run the political operations at the grassroots, and that is the liberals have constantly said and they have constantly misstated the fact with respect to what Republicans are trying to do, to rescue the Medicare problems that we have in this country and the Medicare program from bankruptcy. What I guess bothers me the most is the idea that you had an American President whose own cabinet members helped to bring about a report of the Medicare Trust Fund that said Medicare is going broke. We have got to do something about it. So Republicans came in with a plan that increased Medicare spending some 40 percent over the next number of years, but increased it from about $4,700 to about $6,200, increased it substantially, yet cut out waste, cut out fraud, cut out abuse, and offered a range of options to our senior citizens. In an issue that was that sensitive and that important to the American people, and particularly our moms and dads and our grandmothers and grandfathers, the decision was made at the White House just not to tell the truth, to tell a lie. So when we increases Medicare spending 40 percent, the gentleman at the White House, Bill Clinton, right down to the grassroots level of liberal leaders in this country, would say, almost in unison, almost chant, ``This is a cut, this is a cut, this is a cut.'' And we would get up and say ``Wait a minute. We are increasing Medicare spending. We are increasing Medicare spending. Is that a cut?'' They said, ``We do not care where you are going, that is a cut.'' And they scared literally millions of senior citizens.

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield just briefly, there is no one more qualified to raise this question, because the great Bob Stump that you just spoke of, who is a dear friend and one of the finest people in this House, and is pure gold with respect to national security and veterans issues, Bob Stump left his family at the age of 17 in World War II and joined the United States Navy, probably the youngest sitting Member in this body or the other body to have joined the military. That is what this law was for. The Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act was for the Bob Stumps of the world, so when they went off for 2 years or more, they would not lose their farm because of a lawsuit that they did not even know about which came to a judgment while they were gone. He is the kind of guy that this law was passed for, right where we are standing in this body, in those very dramatic years just before Pearl Harbor. So it is appropriate that the dean of the Arizona delegation, Bob Stump, and I might add another very fine person and a very fine Member of this body and a very excellent pilot also, a former Member of the United States Air Force, Robert Dornan, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Personnel of the Committee on National Security, who is joining Mr. Stump in this challenge to the way the President has misapplied a basic act that was meant to protect people who went off to serve their country.

Mr. HUNTER. If the gentleman will yield, I appreciate him yielding. This is one of those things where even though the gentleman who is in the White House is of another party, you hope when you read a story like that, that it is not true, that he has not tried to do this, because the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act was passed for one reason, and that was because GI's, like Audie Murphy, were going over to foreign theaters and were expected to go because we were on the verge, we were getting into World War II, and we knew people would be leaving for 1, 2, 3, 4 years at a time. Some of them might never come back. The last thing that you wanted for a veteran who was overseas fighting in Europe or later on in Asia or in other places was to have a lawsuit filed against him in American courts while he was off fighting in the jungle someplace, and since he was unaware of it, have that lawsuit basically turn into a judgment for lack of response from the soldier or sailor who did not even know it was being filed, and have that judgment end up taking away his farm or his house or something else. It was meant to give relief to America's fighting men who were overseas fighting for their country, and women, I might add. So people like the women who were ferrying planes for Jackie Cochran's WASPS in World War II, the women who took planes back and forth to Great Britain, had the same type of relief. So for a sitting President of the United States, who is surrounded by lawyers, who never stepped a foot overseas during the conflict in which he said he loathed the military, for him to cloak himself in an act that was designed to keep basic American soldiers from losing their farm while they were off fighting and were not available to answer a court summons, is absolutely a misuse of this act. Here is a President who has got wall-to-wall lawyers. My gosh, I am sure the American Trial Lawyers will lend him a couple, since he saved their back on a number of occasions. I just hope, there are some times you say ``I do not care if he is Democrat or Republican. I just hope he did not do that.'' I hope this is a farce, that this is not true, that somebody pulled an April Fool's joke on this reporter.

Mr. HUNTER. Would the gentleman yield on that point?

Mr. HUNTER. The lawsuit, I understand it is, what, a sexual harassment lawsuit by a young lady in Arkansas. But to me that is not what is the jarring point of this. To me what is the jarring point of this is that the President would invoke the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act when he is not a soldier or a sailor, and in fact when he at one point made that statement that he loathed America's military.

Mr. HUNTER. Well, funny you should bring that up. I saw something that I thought was an April Fool's thing. Today there was an article in the paper that said that the President was asking for protection under the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act from being sued civilly. I thought that was one of those things that they were bringing out a kind of an April Fool's thing, kind of a satire. But I understand it is true, that he is actually saying that he as Commander-in-Chief qualifies for the Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act, since he is in the military, because he is the head of the Armed Services, and therefore this lawsuit in Arkansas cannot touch him. I was amazed.

Mr. HUNTER. Actually there is not a substantial revision of the President's powers, because most of the President's powers come under the Constitution. The President is the Commander-in-chief of the Armed Services. So if you are worried about the Marines having enough ammo, you can go to Congress and you can get enough ammunition. That is what the Marines did. If you are worried about the safety record of the planes that have been crashing recently, you can come in and ask for the safety upgrades, which the Clinton administration had not wanted to fund, but we did under the Republican leadership. But if you want to have a Commander-in-Chief who is not going to lead your young Marines and soldiers out from a new adventure every 3 or 4 weeks, you are going to have to change one thing, and that is the Commander-in-Chief. So the only answer for the American people for that one is to get a new Commander-in-Chief. But on that point, it is true that if you ask the Commandant of the Marine Corps, he told us that the young Marines today have a higher personnel tempo; that is they have to leave their families more often and go out to some part of the world under this President's foreign policy, that at any time since World War II. You have more people leaving home, being deployed for long periods of time, than at any time since World War II.

Mr. HUNTER. That is right. The President vetoed the bill. One of the articulated reasons was that he did not like that inhibition on what he thought were his Commander-in-Chief powers.

Mr. HUNTER. That bill was vetoed.

Mr. HUNTER. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. HUNTER. I thank the gentleman for his very articulate demonstration or description of what Federal Government should not do, and that is to impose on the American people at every level of life. What I think is ironic is the fact that there are a few things that the Federal Government should do that it is not doing, and one of those things is the defense bill that we have just put on the House floor. I can recall, as the chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Procurement in the Committee on National Security, asking the services to come into my office along with my Democrat counterpart, the ranking minority member, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Skelton]. Ike and I sat there and asked the services, under the Clinton administration's budget, whether or not they had enough basic ammunition, enough bullets to fight the two-war scenario that they have to fight if America is going to be secure; that is, perhaps to be engaged in a war in the Middle East, like the one against Saddam Hussein, but to have enough ammunition and enough supplies to take on, for example, the North Koreans, if they should take advantage of a war in the Middle East to come down the Korean Peninsula. So we asked the people who are in charge of the ammunition supply if under the Clinton administration's budget they had enough basic ammo, enough bullets to fight what we are going to require them to fight. And the Marines, the Marines always being candid, said, ``No, frankly not, Congressman.'' So we asked them for a list of what they needed, and they came up with an inadequacy, a requirement of 96 million M-16 bullets that they were short under President Clinton's defense budget for the job that we will call on them in time of conflict to do. So here is an administration that is getting into every aspect of people's lives, but the one aspect that the Constitution charges them to be concerned about and to carry out, which is to defend the country, they are not doing. I was absolutely amazed when we got this list of everything from basic M-16 rounds. In fact, the gentleman, my friend from Arizona and my friend from Georgia, may have seen me carrying around an empty ammo pouch, a U.S. Marine ammo pouch to symbolize the M-16 bullets. They are short howitzer rounds and down to that basic M-16 bullet.

Mr. HUNTER

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, my colleagues let us go over the state of play here with exactly what we are talking about. Every single reduction in strategic systems that the gentleman from California spoke of and the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Hamilton] spoke of are taking place; all those reductions are taking place because we signed START I. The Russians signed START I. We signed START I. And we agreed to reduce these nuclear weapons with our own taxpayer dollars. That means the Russians agreed to reduce their systems with rubles, we agreed to reduce our systems at our expense with dollars, and we proceeded on that course to go down approximately from 12,000 nuclear weapons to about 6,000, and we have been proceeding on that course. We never agreed that we would pay the Russians for the reduction that they were making under START I. We never agreed we would subsidize that. But in 1991 we felt that the Russians were so fragile with that new democracy and that attempted democracy that we would help them. So we implemented Nunn-Lugar, and a lot of us agreed with that; it was a good program. The point is that the Russians need to have their feet held to the fire. Now, it is a good deal if two neighbors agree to disarm, and if the gentleman from California Mr. Dellums, agrees to disarm, and I agree to disarm, and Mr. Dellums says, ``I need a little extra money to disarm, Mr. Hunter; could you help,'' that is a good deal. But it is not a good deal if my neighbor then takes some of the money or the resources that are freed up from my subsidizing his disarmament and builds some new weapons. We are not concerned about the new SS-25. It is extremely accurate. We are concerned about their new strategic ballistic missile submarine system. We are concerned about their biological weapons development. Now, I assure my colleagues in the end, when the smoke clears, there is going to be some Nunn-Lugar money on the table. But we need to have some conditions on money, and this starts the process. The Solomon amendment holds the Russians' feet to the fire, and let me just say the sales of nuclear technology to Iran, the biological weapons development that we know violates the biological weapons conventions, their new strategic missiles that they are building, are not in the spirit of the reductions that we have made, if not the law. So this holds the feet of the Russians to the fire. Vote for these certifications. We are going to end up looking like dummies. We are going to be the guys that paid money to the Soviet Union to dismantle weapons while they were building new ones. Let us not be in that position. Please support Solomon.