Adam Smith

Mr. SMITH of Washington

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Chair, I yield myself 2 minutes. Madam Chair, what is at dispute here is fact-checking. It is not true that businesses or anyone in America can say whatever they want. Facts do matter. I mean, if the U.S. Government is doing business with a company that says that their product will let you live to 200 years and cure cancer, they don't have the freedom to do that. I would hope that someone with the administration would check that and say that is not somebody we want to do business with. This amendment basically is saying facts do not matter and basically saying that they don't exist, that everyone says what they want to say, and we just go along with it. That is completely wrong. You should do fact-checking. Now, I completely agree with the gentleman that facts are not as black and white as a lot of times people say they are. We should have robust disputes about what actually happened, what the information is out there. This amendment does not allow for that. This amendment says anything goes. Any effort whatsoever to check the accuracy of what is being said and done by people we are doing business with is going to be strictly prohibited. I understand where this is coming from. A lot of this is coming from disputes conservatives have, but you can't just say whatever you want to say. The people who tried to overturn the 2020 election are learning that. We have heard about the attack on this Capitol on January 6. We have heard people say that it didn't happen or that it was antifa, an inside job, the government. All of these things are wrong. It is not: You say this; I say that. Wrong. Facts do exist, even if some of them turn out to be wrong. This amendment says: No, we are giving up. We are not even trying to figure out what is true. Anything goes. Have fun with it. I don't think that is a good idea in general, but it is a particularly bad idea in our national security environment that we are in right now because Russia and China love that approach. They regularly feed the disinformation battles in the U.S. on both the right and left.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Chair, I yield myself an additional 30 seconds. They find stories that agitated people on the right or agitated people on the left, and they amplified them. We are seeing this all over the place with the Ukraine war as Russia has spread story after story that is picked up by people here. It is in our national security interests to check those facts and not spread propaganda damaging to this country. Dispute it. Sometimes they get it wrong. Let's have that debate, but please let's not pass this amendment that basically says there are no facts, that whatever you say is true just because you said it. That is not correct. Please defeat this amendment. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time. Madam Chair, what this amendment says, as the gentleman just said, is that it is not the government's job to figure out what is true. That is a shocking statement. What would be accurate is the government needs to be careful when they are trying to figure out what is true. I don't disagree with that. If they mess that up or get something wrong, let's talk about it, but please, let's not have the United States Congress say that the government should have no interest whatsoever in what is true or what is not true. You all just go have fun, say whatever you want to say, and we will keep giving you money for whatever. Let's try to get an accurate picture of what is going on. As difficult and challenging as that can be at times, the alternative of saying that facts don't exist and truth doesn't exist, so say whatever you want, is not an alternative we should embrace. Please defeat this amendment. Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, the problem with this is that many think that a radical gender ideology is that trans and gay people exist. We heard a Member on the floor earlier today on the Republican side of the aisle say trans people don't exist. So that is not a radical ideology. This would ban that. We have seen this happen. You are not allowed to acknowledge that gay or transgender people exist. That is deeply damaging. It is not a radical ideology and it shouldn't be banned. Mr. Chair, I urge defeat of this amendment.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, there is actually quite a bit in this amendment that I do agree with. I think ideologies that are explicitly racist are problematic, and I certainly have seen that done. There are examples of the teaching of critical race theory and promotion of critical race theory that I personally disagree with, but there are two reasons to oppose this amendment. Number one, that is not happening in the United States military. We had a great debate earlier about why recruitment is down. Part of it is because of the fundamental dishonesty that the rightwing is saying about the military in terms of what is going on. They are not promoting critical race theory. It is a theory they do talk about, just like they talked about communism and fascism and a whole wide variety of other things that they don't agree with. To suggest, as this amendment does, that our military is promoting any of this ideology is completely wrong. The second problem I have with this amendment is thatt it does sort of push in the other direction, to want to sort of suggest, as we have seen in Florida and other States, that racism isn't really a thing. There was a famous example where it was said: What we ought to be teaching people is that, in fact, slavery had its upside. So there are problems with taking that approach. In particular, there is something in here about whether or not the Declaration of Independence is a racist document. That is a debate, I think, certainly we should have, but a document that basically enshrines--actually, it is the Declaration of Independence. I guess the Constitution is in there, too--enshrines the fact that if you are a Black person, you cannot vote and you count as three-fifths of a person. I think it would kind of be interesting to debate whether or not that was racist because I think it kind of was. To ignore the history of our country, both good or bad, is a mistake. This amendment pushes us toward ignoring any of the history that is racist, that has promoted white supremacy, which has promoted slavery and Jim Crow. To say that the people being educated in our military schools should ignore that history, I think, is a great weakness. The military does not promote CRT. They should have a robust discussion about various ideologies and also the history of racism in this country. Ignoring it will do a disservice to the men and women who serve in the military and to the country. Mr. Chair, I oppose this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Ms. Tokuda).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Hawaii.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I think we have concluded our remarks as well. For all the reasons stated, I urge opposition, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chair, the maker of this amendment is correct. This is an issue that we have litigated before the House already. I forget how many years ago it was now, but controversy arose over different flags being flown at different military institutions. We attempted to resolve that issue, and we did resolve that issue. We resolved the issue by saying there would be these approved flags. The other piece of it is that if the local leadership agrees, they may fly a flag as well because there are a whole lot of flags out there in the world, and we didn't want to contemplate absolutely all of them. If somebody is a Dallas Cowboys fan and wants to fly a Dallas Cowboys flag somewhere, the commander or civilian leadership can rightly decide whether or not it is appropriate within that unit. I am with him on the initial part about how much he loves the U.S. flag. I love the U.S. flag, as well. Let's be clear: This amendment has absolutely nothing to do with the U.S. flag. The U.S. flag can be flown, as it well should be, and we appreciate it. This is about commanders and civilian leadership at local military installations being able to decide whether or not they want to fly other flags. That was part of the compromise that we agreed to. There is no necessity for banning this. If you rise to be the person who is in charge of a military installation, I am going to trust you to be able to make this decision. It is not something that Congress needs to insert itself into. We don't need to decide on whether every single flag should go up or go down. We litigated this issue. We resolved it in the NDAA. We do not need to reopen it. Mr. Chair, I urge opposition to this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I would say Congress has decided. We decided on 13 flags, and we decided to trust the military installation commanders to make other decisions. We did decide. We have done this two or three times. They want us to decide something different. That is not violating anything. That is just going at what they think Congress ought to decide to do. We have exercised the law and the right that was laid out. We exercised it in the way we did. We approved it in this body, the Senate, and the conference report. It does not need to be reopened. Mr. Chair, I urge us to defeat this amendment, and I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Virginia (Ms. McClellan).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time. It is ironic, the gentleman arguing about how Congress doesn't need to pass a bunch of laws while he is urging us to pass another one. He is the one who is actually proposing and having us pass something else that would place a restriction after we have already dealt with that. This is not an issue that needs to be revisited. We worked it out. We have a bunch of approved flags for everybody. We allow the local commanders to make local decisions. Congress certainly should exercise our authority of oversight over the Department of Defense, and there are a wide variety of different areas where we need to do this. Micromanaging what flag is flown at every single installation in the United States of America and beyond is not a place I think we need to insert ourselves. Mr. Chair, I oppose this amendment and urge the body to do so. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from New Jersey (Ms. Sherrill).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I will point out, as I am sure the gentleman recognizes, there are helicopter pilots in the Army and there are helicopter pilots who are in combat, so it is perfectly appropriate to have a helicopter pilot talk about what it is like to serve in a combat role, and I think the gentleman would agree with me on that. There is one other aspect of this amendment that has always troubled me. We talk about combat MOSes, but the actual substance of the amendment would set a gender-neutral standard to be in the Army, period, and that is what is concerning because there are a lot of different jobs within the Army. There is combat, which you described, absolutely. We also need intel officers, we need linguistic experts, and we need a whole lot of people who will have a different set of qualifications. What the Army was concerned about with this last year, how we came to a compromise--which you have decided you didn't like, apparently, even though you guys are in the majority, and we passed this last year--was that they were concerned that if you required this you would be booting a ton of women out of the military now who aren't in combat roles. The breadth of this amendment is what concerns me. In addition, like I said, last year we did this, and the Army is tasked with coming back to us with new fitness standards for the broad Army and also for the very specific combat MOSes to make sure that they meet the standards, that the gentleman is quite correct must be there, for certain jobs, but it depends on the job. It also is something that is not said on this floor, and I love the fact that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would have you believe that the military has always been this completely unbiased, unbigoted place, and no one has anything to worry about. We are just going to treat everybody perfectly equally, and everything will be fine. I confess, I have not served in the military, and maybe someone who has served in the military will say, oh, no, we have never done that. I would think you were being dishonest if you said that because bias and bigotry have been a problem. It has been a particular problem for women serving in the military, as any woman, Republican or Democrat, who has served in the military in the last 40 years can tell you. Efforts to make sure that women know that they will be included and given a fair shot are important. This amendment undermines that. Mr. Chair, I urge opposition, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I will be brief. I don't fundamentally disagree with the idea that we learned a lot about the relative effectiveness of masks. I am not a huge fan of them myself. The main reason they tend not to be effective is people don't wear them or they don't wear them correctly. I think what we have learned is that there are some circumstances in which masks could conceivably be helpful. I don't like the way the scientists in this country presented the mask information to the American public. I think they undermined a lot of credibility in the way they did it by not explaining it in an honest way, and I think they were wrong in a number of different areas. This amendment says there is never any time ever when a mask mandate makes sense, and that is just further than even I am willing to go. I don't know when that time is going to be. I have not done an exhaustive study of the science. I have read a few New Yorker articles in other places that raised some of the concerns. To have an amendment that says under no circumstances can our medical professionals within the military conclude that this is a good idea goes too far. I oppose the amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I actually don't have any more arguments on this point other than what I have said. Mr. Chair, I urge opposition, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Virginia (Ms. McClellan.)