On May 15, the House Democratic leadership tried to use the Iraq/Afghanistan supplemental as a $250 billion Christmas tree filled with domestic spending unrelated to war spending.
I withheld my vote, as did most Republicans, to force the Democrats to come back with a clean war funding bill.
My vote on what the Democrats termed the GI Bill--which they attached as an amendment to the Emergency Supplemental--is similar. I am, in fact, a sponsor of the original GI Bill, but Democrats attached so much pork to the bill that it became a wasteful expenditure instead of a bill to help our military men and women.
We must support our military men and women. We also must control spending. It's unconscionable that Democrats would exploit our troops to accelerate their wasteful, deficit-expanding spending.
The items the Democrats attached to the GI Bill included a $51.6 Billion Tax Increase, a Medicaid Regulations Moratorium, USAID funding for foreign countries, Gulf Coast Levees funding, and funding for the Bureau of Prisons and Census Bureau.
Democrats should not be exploiting our troops to force the passage of unrelated items. I and other fiscally conservative Republicans are demanding an up and down vote on the original GI Bill. Our men and women in uniform deserve no less. Then, if the Democrats want, we can have an up and down vote on these other issues and see if they survive on their merits.