Reinforcing Education Accountability In Development Act
Floor Speech
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Madam President, like all of us, I would like to join with our fellow citizens and colleagues in expressing our deep condolences to the victims of Hurricane Harvey. All Americans stand with the people of Texas who have been devastated by this terrible storm as they work to recover and rebuild their communities.
My thoughts and prayers are also with the people of Florida as they prepare for Hurricane Irma. I urge everyone in the path of this horrible storm to pay attention to instructions from local officials to stay safe.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, I am pleased that the legislation before us includes $15 billion in emergency funding to help the people of Texas put their lives back together. Congress should and must provide this needed relief.
In due time, if the devastation of Irma is anywhere near as bad as predicted, obviously I and others will support sending Federal funding to assist the people of Florida with recovery. That is clearly a requirement and function of government.
Madam President, I also support increasing the debt ceiling as a necessary way to prevent default on our government debt. However, I cannot in good conscience support those very important pieces of this legislation if it also means supporting a continuing resolution.
I have come to this floor many times to talk about the harmful effects of continuing resolutions on our military. Year after year, we have lurched from one short-term fix to another without doing the hard work of governing and budgeting. And year after year, I have reminded my colleagues that continuing resolutions are not only no way to fund the government, they inflict great harm upon those Americans we are constitutionally obliged to provide for, and that is our men and women in uniform.
Our defense leaders have also sounded the alarm. For the last several years, our senior military and civilian leaders have come to the Senate Armed Services Committee and asked for the same thing: that Congress provide stable, predictable funding and that we provide it on time. Is that a lot to ask, stable and predictable funding, and providing it on time?
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee this year, Secretary Mattis pointed out that ``during nine of the past ten years, Congress has enacted 30 separate Continuing Resolutions to fund the Department of Defense, thus inhibiting our readiness and adaptation to new challenges.'' He asked Congress to ``pass a FY 2018 budget in a timely manner to avoid yet another harmful Continuing Resolution.'' Let me explain. A continuing resolution just continues and continues at previous years' levels. I will talk about some of the impacts continuing resolutions have had.
The Chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford, also stated that ``without sustained, sufficient, and predictable funding, I assess that within 5 years we will lose our ability to project power; the basis of how we defend the homeland, advance U.S. interests, and meet our alliance commitments.''
My friends and colleagues, that doesn't come from Senator John McCain, it comes from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that without predictable funding, within 5 years, we will lose our ability to project power, the basis of how we defend the homeland, et cetera.
I shouldn't have to remind everyone that threats are on the rise around the world. Global terrorist networks, increasing great power competition with Russia and China, malign Iranian influence spreading across the Middle East, a North Korean dictator racing to acquire missiles that can hit the United States with nuclear weapons--the threats to our national security have not been more complex or daunting than at any time in the past seven decades.
Let us not forget that we are a nation at war. There are brave young men and women serving in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places. We must always ask ourselves, are we really doing all we can to support them? There is no point to discussing our strategy for Afghanistan or North Korea or ISIS or any of the other myriad of threats we are currently facing if we are simply going to fund the military through a continuing resolution.
My friends, the state of our military is dire. The overwhelming majority of our forces are not fit for combat in the near term. Three out of our fifty-nine Army brigades are combat-ready. Four of sixty- four Air Force squadrons are ready to ``fight tonight''--that means fully combat ready. Fewer than half of the Marine and Navy planes are ready for combat. The Air Force has a pilot shortfall of 1,500, 1,000 of whom are fighter pilots. The Navy has a maintenance backlog of 5.4 million man-days scheduled for 2017.
The hard truth is, our military is declining. The President of the United States campaigned with a full commitment of rebuilding our military. If we do a continuing resolution, we are not only not rebuilding our military, we are harming our military.
The hard truth is, the military is declining. For evidence of this, we need look no further than all the headlines about ship collisions and aviation accidents during peacetime training operations--incidents that have tragically taken the lives of dozens of our brave men and women in uniform. The incident involving USS McCain, which killed 10 young sailors, is only the latest example.
So how did we get here? How did we get into this position? Uncertain budgets that are consistently late. Continuing to increase the operational tempo for our military despite not having sufficient money to pay for it. Making cuts elsewhere to stay afloat, like training and maintenance. And we are about to do the same thing. Apparently, watching as young men and women die for entirely avoidable reasons seems not to be enough for us to change.
To be sure, while the budget alone will not fix all of the underlying causes of the recent incidents, the military cannot improve without timely and growing budgets. Yet that is exactly what a CR--a continuing resolution--will not provide. A continuing resolution will lock the Department of Defense into last year's funding levels, it will prevent them from reprogramming funding to meet emerging needs, and it will prohibit the start of new programs to modernize for future threats.
Perhaps worst of all, a continuing resolution will mandate a level of spending $52 billion less than the President's budget request.
The military cannot fix its readiness problems without more funding.
The military cannot grow its forces to meet the expanding requirements of a global threat environment under a continuing resolution. A continuing resolution will not allow our military to modernize its forces to ensure we maintain our strategic advantage over our competitors.
While the President and this Congress understand that the military does have a need for additional funding to rebuild the military, we are asking them to keep treading water for 3 months for no reason whatsoever. A continuing resolution is a crutch we rely on when we cannot pass actual appropriations bills. It is a temporary solution to avoid the worst possible outcome--a Federal shutdown--and to allow us more time to reach a solution for funding the government.
The majority of us can agree that passing continuing resolutions is not the proper way of funding government. Congress cannot perform oversight by passing continuing resolutions. The Federal Government cannot execute effectively or efficiently when locked into last year's funding bills. Having to pass a continuing resolution, by all accounts, is a failure by the Congress of the United States to fund the Federal Government.
I understand the need to use these from time to time as bipartisan spending agreements are not always easy to come by. What I do not understand is why we are voting on a continuing resolution 3 weeks before the actual start of the next year without having spent any time in the Senate on actually trying to pass an appropriations bill or negotiating a bipartisan budget agreement. How is it that we are voting on a continuing resolution--a mechanism of last resort--before we have even made a single attempt at funding the government? There has been no discussion of a bipartisan budget deal. There has not even been a fiscal year 2018 budget resolution. We have not called up a single 2018 appropriations bill--not a single one for 2018. Quite simply, we have not been doing our jobs. If we are going to call ourselves the world's greatest deliberative body, we have to do one heck of a lot better. We have 3 weeks before we need to pass fiscal year 2018 funding. Why have we given up before having even tried? We could be spending this month debating a bipartisan budget deal we all know we will now need to pass in December.
Attaching emergency funding for hurricane relief to a must-pass continuing resolution and debt limit increase is irresponsible and a dereliction of our most routine duties. It is the result of yet another self-inflicted--I repeat, self-inflicted--crisis. Instead of returning to the regular order by moving individual spending bills to fund our government and our national security priorities, with ample time for debate and amendments, we are shirking our responsibilities and kicking the can down the road. All of us are responsible for the detriment to the men and women serving in our military during a time of incredible global uncertainty.
I would like to vote to provide assistance to the people of Texas. I cannot vote for another continuing resolution that will harm our men and women in uniform. Quite often, I go to where we have conflicts-- Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries in the region. I can tell you that these young men and women who are serving in uniform, under difficult and challenging circumstances, are not being provided with the support, the weapons, the strategy, or, most of all, the funding that is necessary.
Yes, we have been in this conflict for many years. The main reason the conflict is not over is, we never had a strategy by which to win.
Now we have a national security team that has a strategy to win, but they cannot do it without the tools they need to win but also do their best to protect the lives of these young men and women who are literally placing their lives on the line.
Meanwhile, what do we do? We decide that by December 15, maybe we will take up a continuing resolution. We may take certain action.
Meanwhile, we are not providing the men and women in the military with what they need not only to win but to do everything we can to ensure that we have provided them with every possible means of protecting their own health and welfare.
I say to my colleagues, we have seen this movie before. We are lurching down the road to December 15--December 8, I think it has been changed to now--when everybody will be eager to get out of town and go home for one's undeserved Christmas holiday break. The point is, today we should be taking up the budget, taking up our appropriations bills, and moving forward. If people want to block it, fine. Then let's stay in tonight. Let's stay in on Friday and Saturday and Sunday. Let's do something really unusual. The men and women who are serving over there, whom we are supposed to be taking care of, do not leave on Thursday afternoon and go back on Monday. They are out there, putting themselves on the line for us every single hour of every single day, and they deserve a lot better than what they are getting from this administration and this Congress, where the Republican Party has the majority.
I urge my colleagues again, Why don't we sit down? Why don't we move forward with these appropriations bills? Why don't we take care of the men and women who are serving? There are so many things we can do for them and for the country that we are not doing today. I urge my colleagues to sit down together, and let's move forward because the American people deserve it, and our oath of office makes it incumbent on us to practice it.
I yield the floor.
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