National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. GALLAGHER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from California for his work, in a bipartisan fashion, on the CITI Subcommittee. His bipartisan spirit is always a pleasure, and the innovative mindset that my friend has brought to our work together, I very much enjoyed.

My staff prepared a beautiful speech. I will, instead, be blunt and, hopefully, be brief.

The way I see it is that we are in the early stages of a strategic competition or a new cold war with the Chinese Communist Party, and we are not winning in part because we haven't grasped the fundamental insight that in order to prevent war, which is a goal we all share, one must move and one must wage peace with the same alacrity, urgency, and creativity that one wages war.

Despite the horrors on display in Eastern Europe on the battlefields of Ukraine, we have not yet improved our deterrent posture in the Indo- Pacific west of the International Date Line such that we can persuade Xi Jinping that his attempt to take Taiwan by force will fail. That is where this bill comes in.

This makes extraordinary improvements in terms of our deterrent posture, which is a testament to the collaboration between Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Smith.

To the Members of this body who are skeptical and who feel as if they didn't get enough wins in the bill, I get it. We are in divided government. This bill would look different if there was unified government one way or the other. What we have here is a serious bipartisan compromise. It is not perfect, but it is a good bill.

The Armed Services Committee is the last remaining functional body in Congress. It works because everyone is brought into the process. None of us gets 100 percent of what we want, but we all get a chance to influence the outcome.

Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to support this critical piece of legislation. I believe it promotes the cause of peace, and I believe it promotes the cause of defending American sovereignty.

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