Departments of Commerce and Justice, Science, and Related Agencies for Fiscal Year 2006--Conference Report

DEPARTMENTS OF COMMERCE AND JUSTICE, SCIENCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES FOR FISCAL YEAR 2006--CONFERENCE REPORT -- (Senate - November 15, 2005)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I was just across the way in my office working on several things that I think are important to the country. We were working on a bill to stop the increases in taxes that will occur unless we act immediately. This is another bill that the Democrats are trying to obstruct, but it is critically important that we pass this stop-the-tax-increase bill in order to keep our economy growing and to keep creating jobs in this country.

I was also working in my office, with some of my staff, on some of the things we can do to move this country more toward energy independence. But I kept listening to my distinguished Democrat colleague from Illinois and heard him talking about our President and this war. The more I listened, the more frustrated I became. As a matter of fact, I would have to say I became very angry because what I was hearing was baseless accusations and shameless criticisms, things that were said that I think diminish the Senate as an institution, which I feel must be refuted.

I am afraid that my Democratic colleagues are playing the war on terror similar to a political game. It is a dangerous game that endangers our troops, and it is a dangerous game that the Democrats have played before. Over the last 25 years, terrorist attacks in this country and around the world have increased. During the Clinton administration, Americans were killed in our embassies, on our warships and even in New York City when the World Trade Center was attacked by terrorists. From the Democrats and the Clinton administration, there was a lot of talk, but there was no action. It was all left to the next President to deal with. Instead of dealing with it in a way that would help secure our future, the Clinton administration instead decimated our intelligence network with politically correct ideas that greatly reduced our ability to gather intelligence in difficult places around the world. John Deutsch, President Clinton's Director of the CIA created rules that hurt our intelligence community's ability to gather human intelligence.

Now my Democrat colleagues accuse President Bush of using poor intelligence to do what they said needed to be done before he was even elected President.

In 1998, with President Clinton's leadership, we supported regime change in Iraq. This was something that was determined as a national policy years before President Bush took office. There are some reasons we did this. Saddam Hussein had demonstrated that he was a danger to civilization years before Ð9/11. He not only attacked Kuwait and tried to assassinate an American President, he committed mass murder all over his country using weapons of mass destruction. He was a deadly killer.

He supported terrorism in other countries. If a terrorist in Israel blew himself up and killed Israelis, the family of that terrorist would receive a check from Saddam Hussein.

To suggest that Iraq was not supporting terrorists is not true. Saddam Hussein, as part of the original gulf war settlement, agreed to document and prove the destruction of his weapons of mass destruction, which he acknowledged he had. But he did not disarm. He did not document the destruction. The inspectors had to play a cat-and-mouse game with him. The world did not know what Saddam Hussein had. Our decimated intelligence network had to guess whether he had them. President Bush made the only decision he could.

Knowing the history of Saddam Hussein, having a national policy that was written by the Democrats to remove him from power, he made a decision to take action instead of talking about it. The justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power happened before President Bush was elected and had been supported by Democrats. But now they come down to the Senate floor and suggest that because the

President had some bad information that he rushed us to war. In fact, leaving Saddam Hussein in power would not have been acceptable to any administration that looked at the facts.

This country cannot allow murderous dictators who have attacked our allies, threatened civilians and destabilized the Middle East to stay in power.

Now we have Democrats, whose attitude basically embolden terrorists for a decade during the 1990s by talking but not doing, on the Senate floor attacking our President for doing what we knew had to be done. But this is the Democrat pattern. They say anything, but they do nothing.

We are dealing with a serious energy situation in this country today, but for the last decade they have obstructed any development of our own domestic energy supplies. Now they are on the floor blaming President Bush for the high energy prices, while the President and the Republican Congress have managed, despite the Democratic obstruction, to pass an Energy bill that will move us toward energy independence.

The Democrats are on the floor often complaining about American job losses, but when we try to pass legislation that improves the business climate in this country, they obstruct. They obstructed passing our elimination of junk lawsuits and the elimination of fraudulent bankruptcies. They tried to stop that, voting en bloc against it. But the President and the Republicans have been able to pass that and move us along.

There are a whole list of things that Republicans, with the President's leadership, have done from the Energy bill, to class action and bankruptcy reform. We have passed a budget that reduced the growth in spending. We have passed a number of things that improve vocational training. There is a huge list.

On the back side of this list is what America needs to know about: The Democrat agenda, of which they have none. The reason they are misleading the American people about our President and the importance of winning the war on terror is they have no agenda. They are not willing to step out and take any leadership on any issue. So all they do is obstruct, attack, distort, and complain with their ``do nothing'' agenda.

It is hard for some of us, as we try to go about our work, to move America forward and address the difficult problems of today and create more opportunities for tomorrow, when we have to carry a concrete block we call the Democrat Party. But when they go across the line and start misleading America about the importance of this war on terror and treating it akin to some kind of political game, when we and our children and future generations are in danger, as is the rest of the world. As we see almost every day, this war on terror is real--we cannot treat it as some kind of silly political debate where they are trying to give the Commander in Chief of this country a time line as to when our troops need to go home. It is like they have not bothered to go to Iraq themselves and meet with the troops, as I have had the chance to do twice this year, and talk with the generals. The President has met every deadline he set for elections, to approve the constitution, and we are moving exactly as he said we would move, to turn more of the defense of that country over to their military. That is happening. They are opening businesses, schools, and hospitals, and we are helping them along the way. When we get them to the point where they can defend themselves, the President will bring our troops home, but continue to stand firm against terror, wherever it exists around the world.

This is not a game. Terror is a real enemy, and many Americans have already died because we did not take the war on terror seriously. It is time to take it seriously and to stop playing political games with the most important issue of our generation.

I do not think we as a Nation should ever yield to terror or the type of rhetoric we have had to listen to today.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

http://thomas.loc.gov/