Following up as I said I would on HR 4909, the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017. We voted Wednesday night on the bill, which passed 277 to 147. I voted yes.
It was 1,300 pages long, and like any of these bills that combine many areas of government spending and programs, there was enough good and bad to give all members of Congress a reason to vote for or against it. I remain concerned about the lack of an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and the misuse of the Overseas Contingency Operations funding. Our troops deserve the certainty of an AUMF in registering public support for their efforts, and I continue to believe that war contingency funds should only be used for that purpose.
I have, many times over, registered those concerns and will continue to do so.
Some of the good things in this bill were the fact that the bill is within the budget caps, has needed reforms for procurement of equipment, and contains needed capital funding for platforms like the F-35 and F-18. Two of my amendments, one to require that the Marines and the Army use the same type of rifle ammunition and another to keep track of the cost of flyovers, were adopted.
Language to draft women was left on the cutting room floor, as the bill went through consideration. The concern over women in the draft is an issue that I raised back when the inclusion of women in combat roles was announced earlier this year, and but for the opposition of key Republican leaders, we would have seen women registering with selective service with the passage of the bill.
There was a section of the bill that contains a provision that I fought hard to eliminate that would force new military recruits to wear one model of one brand of running shoes, New Balance. The data out there shows this new earmark will prove costly for both recruits and the taxpayer. The Department of Defense (DOD) concluded that the provision would "directly lead to a higher recruit injury rate at basic training" and therefore concurred with my opposition. The Association of the United States Army supported my amendment as well. It's a possibility that the provision will get taken out after the Senate and the House complete their negotiation on the final version of the bill. We will see.
The House also voted yesterday on H.R. 4974, the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act for 2017, which funds the Veterans Affairs hospital system and various Department of Defense construction projects at a cost of $81.6 billion. I voted yes on the bill, and it passed by a vote of 295 to 129. I cast my vote in favor of the overall bill but wanted to highlight a few amendments that came up and explain my reasoning for these votes.
The first was offered by Rep. Earl Blumenauer and would allow Veterans Affairs doctors to provide a recommendation of medical marijuana for their patients in states where that is legal. It does not allow them to prescribe it, just to provide recommendations to state licensed doctors to talk about treatment with veteran patients. Rep. Blumenauer offered this amendment last year, and like then, I voted in favor of it. Ultimately, the amendment was adopted 233 to 189. My vote came down to the concept of federalism, where most powers are left to the states and individuals rather than the federal government. In this case, it came down to one question - should the federal government be in the business of usurping all state law? The beauty of the American experiment is that it included "federalism," which allows states to pioneer ideas. Some we may agree with, others not but the operative question in this instance is whether or not the federal viewpoint should always prevail over the view of the state.
U.S. Representative John Fleming offered an amendment that would prohibit funds from being used to house illegal unaccompanied minor aliens at military bases. I voted for this amendment, and it was adopted 219 to 202. This amendment comes in the wake of a recent agreement between the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services requiring the military to house unaccompanied and undocumented alien children at domestic military installations. I believe that the purpose of the military is to ensure that our nation is protected from external threat. I don't think that this purpose can be squared away with providing housing for unaccompanied alien children. Additionally, I am concerned that adhering to this agreement could jeopardize the readiness of our military and siphon away money dedicated to our national defense. My House colleague Rep. Rob Wittman said it best: "By providing housing for illegal immigrants on military installations, we are wasting scarce defense dollars that should be used to train and equip our soldiers to fight our nation's wars. During a time of tight budgets, this is a serious risk."
My South Carolina colleague, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, offered a package of four amendments attempting to eliminate $172 million in funding for military construction of overseas bases that were paid for by dipping into a special fund, known as the Overseas Contingency Operations fund. It was originally meant to be only for war funding, but it has been stretched to pay for other defense requests that have nothing to do with the war.
One 2013 Harvard study puts the long-term costs from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at over $6 trillion. In that context, piling on more spending that looks from the outside like it is meant for war operations but in reality is for a separate purpose makes it more difficult for taxpayers to understand the true costs of war. It's also the case that this money will have to be borrowed, adding to the existing $19 trillion in national debt. I agreed with Mick's common sense argument that if the government values something, it should find a way to pay for it in a forthright fashion. We may need to construct military projects overseas, but if we do, let's build them into the defense budget and not add them to the cost of "war" fighting in the Middle East. Accordingly, I cast my vote in favor of these amendments, although they each failed.
The last amendment I would like to touch on was offered by Rep. Jared Huffman. I voted against this amendment, but it was adopted by a vote of 265 to 159. Under existing policy, mass grave sites of fallen southern Civil War soldiers at VA national cemeteries can be adorned by a single confederate flag on two occasions during the year: Memorial Day and Confederate Memorial Day. President Bush sanctioned this practice in 2005 and President Obama has kept it in place. Rep. Huffman's amendment would prohibit it.
I well understand that to many, the confederate flag is a symbol of hate, bigotry and more, but there are also many who see it very differently. The debate on what the confederate flag means I suspect will go on for quite some time as it will be driven by the opposing perspectives of those who hold strong views on this subject.
The question we had to ask in this amendment was where is it best for that debate to take place? In this regard, the difference between cemeteries and capitals is profound. In the first, they are places of memorial to lives lived. Any life is imperfect, but most do as best they can. For someone to look back with the beauty of hindsight fifty or one hundred years later and to remove the flag that a dead person died fighting for assumes a level of knowledge about the thoughts and beliefs of the deceased that may well be unfair or inaccurate. It strikes me we should be very careful in dealing with places of memorial to lives lost in conflicts we were not there for.
In contrast, capitals represent the center of our civic discussion in a state or country. It's a place that is alive. People come to deliberate on - and solve - the inevitable differences that come in a society. In this setting, symbols can signal something very different about the openness of that civic forum. Accordingly, I thought the Huffman amendment went too far in eliminating the placement of a flag that was flown but twice a year as memorial to those who died fighting for its cause. Vigorous disagreement with that cause is all that the First Amendment is about. Seeing something we don't like or hear but accepting another's right to view it differently is the cornerstone to the First Amendment. I think it is something we should be exceedingly guarded about altering in this country.