Adam Smith

Mr. SMITH of Washington

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I have no further speakers on this first en bloc. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, pursuant to House Resolution 476, I offer amendments en bloc.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I have an additional speaker. I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume to say that I urge support for the en bloc package. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Chair, I don't have any speakers. We have been doing so many votes on the House floor that it appears we have worn down the Members of Congress. We don't have as many people over here to speak as we normally do on our en bloc packages. Madam Chair, I urge a ``yes'' vote on the en bloc package, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Madam Chair, pursuant to House Resolution 476, I offer amendments en bloc.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time. Just a couple of quick points: First of all, we did not bypass the committee of jurisdiction. We were in constant consultation with the Intelligence Committee, with their staff, and we had that conversation and worked with them to get this result. We did not bypass them. In fact, we got a waiver from the Intelligence Committee to have this amendment before our committee. Our committee takes jurisdiction that this bill has a number of provisions in it, including one on which I worked very closely with the gentlewoman from New York, that has jurisdiction within the intelligence community. We include in this bill items that have their jurisdiction, but we worked with them and in careful consultation. I really don't think it is a lot to ask of our national intelligence to look at the very important issue of how our military action, regardless of who is doing it, impacting casualties, both civilian and otherwise. That is all this amendment does. I think that it is something that we should be doing, regardless, and it is information that will be valuable to this House. Mr. Chair, I would urge adoption of this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I have one more speaker, and then I will be prepared to close.

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

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I am the only remaining speaker at this point, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chair, I would start on a note of agreement. I stand by the comments I made in 2016: Voting against the defense bill doesn't mean you don't support the troops. Now, it is interesting, as we go back to the transcript from 2016, the number of folks on their side of the aisle who said the exact opposite, who rather passionately said we were betraying our country by not supporting the bill. I didn't agree with that then, and I don't agree with it now. But the only partisanship that is going on on this floor is coming 100 percent from the Republican Party. I appreciate the gentleman's words, and I worked very well with him as the ranking member. I continue to work well with him. But on the statement about how the Republican side of the aisle stands ready to work with us to make this bill better, I have seen no evidence of that. Talking about amendments on the floor, the decision to oppose this bill was made in committee before we even got to the floor, and what we are hearing is a whole series of excuses for why they are opposing the bill. It is very simple and straightforward why they are opposing the bill: pure partisanship. They keep talking about the number of times the Democrats voted with them and how this is different, yet the difference is the Republican Party has decided that, if it is not their defense bill 100 percent, they will not vote for it, and then they will stand up and accuse us of being partisan. The reason I cite all of those numbers is that all of the outreach and effort we did to make this bill bipartisan, they did not reach back. This is pure partisanship: If we are in charge, they are not going to support it to try to make us look bad. And the to-ing and fro-ing matters, because that is what guts the bipartisanship. If they will not even try to work with us if they are not in charge, that is the definition of partisanship, and it jeopardizes 58 years of history. I am not going to give up; I am going to keep trying to reach out and keep trying to work with them. But, please, for those of you watching this, understand the only partisan thing going on here is, if the Republicans aren't in charge, they are not going to vote for it. And I will pick just a couple of examples. We heard that we have taken a hatchet to the nuclear budget, so I am sure you are wondering how much we have cut the nuclear budget by. Well, we have increased it by 4 percent. That is taking a hatchet to it? We are engaged, believe it or not, in unilateral disarmament on the floor of this House as we increase the amount of money that we spend on nuclear weapons by 4 percent, as we fully fund the B-21 bomber, the Columbia-class nuclear submarine, the LRSO, and the modernization of our nuclear weapons force. All of these arguments are nonsense. Going back to the personnel argument, they cut the personnel account by more than we did because they didn't agree with the President. All of these arguments are pure partisanship, and nothing drives this point home more clearly than the $733 billion. Now, I can't say it any better than the majority leader said it, but the quote from General Dunford in January of 2017. Well, if that is the case, why did Chairman Thornberry--I am sorry; that is the way I always think of him--write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in November of 2018 insisting that we had to have $733 billion? If we had said $750 billion, they would be on the floor saying, ``Not enough. It has got to be $775 billion,'' because that is the partisanship. This is a really important policy point. These numbers also matter, because accountability at the Pentagon matters. I would submit to you that this bill doesn't just maintain the bipartisan tradition; with Democrats working on this bill, this bill is better for national security because we don't believe in sending a blank check to the Pentagon, and sending a blank check to the Pentagon is not in the best interest of our troops or our national security. Now, Mr. Thornberry is the best person working on reforming our procurement system to try and increase efficiency, and I support him in that effort. But if you try to reform a system and make it more efficient but then say, ``You know what,'' at the last minute, ``here is another $17 billion,'' the people are not going to get the message. They are going to say, ``Accountability? You don't want accountability. You are going to give us more money no matter what we do,'' which is what we have done for far too long. So, yes, we have accountability in this bill, but you have not heard a single good reason to oppose this, other than pure partisanship. And it is a brilliant way of doing things. As a friend of mine said a long time ago, when you are in an argument with someone who is unreasonable, it is hard not to sound unreasonable. It is brilliant. Just vote against the bill and say it is partisan; okay? Partisan is when you ignore the other side. And, my goodness, the people behind me, I mean, I have worked on it, but nobody has worked on it more than my staff and, frankly, the minority party staff. If you could see the hours that we spent working with Republicans to get to ``good'' on a variety of different amendments, you would laugh out loud at the partisanship claim. And I think this is important. I think if the minority party, if the Republican Party, cannot work with us unless they are in charge, then we are not going to get to a bipartisan place. And again, we talk about how we cut the President's budget. It was the President who tweeted out in November that $733 billion was too much. That is what the President said. So as the majority leader said, we took your number, and after we took your number, you said we are being partisan. That is absurd. This is a good bill that protects our country. Every Member of this body should be proud to vote for it. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, may I inquire as to how much time each side has remaining.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Escobar), who is a member of the committee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), who is the majority leader.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would simply note that, in last year's NDAA, when the Republicans were in charge, they cut $751 million from the personnel account, and then the President, 6 months after that, took another $1 billion out of the personnel account to fund his wall. So, in last year's NDAA, which all of them enthusiastically supported, the personnel account was cut by $1.7 billion. We do not simply rubber-stamp the President's request and never have. What we are doing this year is perfectly in keeping with past history. I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Speier), the chair of the Military Personnel Subcommittee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. It is a unique way of looking at the world to describe a nation that has literally thousands of nuclear weapons as unilaterally disarming. I assure the public, we are not doing that. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Brown), a member of the committee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Slotkin), a member of the Armed Services Committee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself 2 minutes. This is an amendment that was actually adopted at the committee level, but there was a technical problem with it which we couldn't get corrected by UC, so we are re-debating it on the House floor. I think it is appropriate. Last year, the Trump administration decided to stop reporting on civilian casualties that were caused by our raids. This amendment reinstates that and requires the Director of National Intelligence to report to us on civilian casualties that have resulted in raids that we have done outside of existing combat zones. We are engaged in many military operations, which we have read about, in places like Somalia, Libya, and Yemen. We think it is appropriate to keep statistics on how effective those raids have been, and one of those measures of effectiveness is the number of civilian casualties that are included in that. That is what this amendment does. We have gotten the support of the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Mr. Schiff, to do this for both DOD operations and intelligence operations. I think it is an important transparency measure that will help us better understand the effects of our military policy. And, I guess, the final thing I would say on this is it is part of an underlying theme. One of the other things that the minority party doesn't like about our bill is that, again, we want to hold the Pentagon accountable. We think Congress actually has a role in defense policy and we shouldn't simply turn it over to the Pentagon. For us to know what is going on with this will inform our decisions as we attempt to exercise legitimate and effective oversight of Pentagon operations. Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of the amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin).

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Langevin), who is the chair of the Intelligence and Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cooper), chairman of the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Courtney), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces.

Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chair, I will just say quickly that I completely agree with the ranking member. The question is, does this bill adequately support our national security? I don't think that is even debatable. There is no question that at $733 billion, with all the bipartisan provisions that we put in there, this bill more than adequately supports our troops and supports our national security. That is why I think it is so wrong that even in committee, the Republicans have decided to oppose it. It does more than adequately support. Now, there are things we disagree with, certainly, but I totally agree with that formulation. If you believe this bill at least adequately, I think more than adequately, supports it, you ought to vote for it. The only comment I will make on the floor amendments is we submitted 480 on the Democratic side, the Republicans submitted 201. So, yes, there are going to be more Democratic amendments, because we, I guess, are a little bit more prolific in that regard, but there is not a partisan effort in that. Mr. Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Norcross), the chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.