Barbara Lee: “I want to thank the gentlelady for yielding and for her tremendous hard work and support. Madam Speaker, I rise in…”

“I want to thank the gentlelady for yielding and for her tremendous hard work and support. Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to this rule and this bill for many reasons, even though the bill contains many provisions I support, such as Ebola funding; a critical $5.67 billion for the President's emergency plan for AIDS relief; PEPFAR, which I helped write, and the Global Fund; programs I have worked on for many years and have supported. But it also includes provisions I cannot support, such as an additional $3.4 billion to fund an unauthorized war against ISIS in Iraq. More than 3 months after this war began, this is 3 months later, Congress has yet to have the constitutionally required mandated debate and vote on an Authorization for the Use of Military Force. We are now involved in another open-ended war in the Middle East without congressional authority. This omnibus also includes $73.7 billion for the overseas contingency operations fund which, quite frankly, is a slush fund. Congress must get serious about transparency and oversight of our Nation's bloated Pentagon spending, and we can do that by auditing the Pentagon, an initiative that has bipartisan support. At the same time that this bill provides billions in war funding, my Republican colleagues included a section that will roll back key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill, putting taxpayers on the hook for Wall Street gambling.…”