Jack Kingston: “I stand in support of the amendment and the passage of the bill, but I want to raise a point which is of great concern…”

“I stand in support of the amendment and the passage of the bill, but I want to raise a point which is of great concern to me as an appropriator and as a fiscal conservative, and that is the Pentagon's practice--and it's being practiced by the Obama administration as it was by the Bush administration--of putting the war on terrorism money for Afghanistan and Iraq and other places around the globe off the military budget. We are debating a budget today which is about $550 billion, but there is another $120 billion which goes under Overseas Contingency Operations which we do not debate or scrutinize nearly as much as we should. What that money does is actually brings us to a military spending bill that is not in the 500 billions but is $670 billion. A lot of that money is not going to emergency spending but ongoing operations. Did anybody last year think we were going to be out of Afghanistan or Iraq this year? No. That money should be in their base budget. As a member of the Defense appropriations committee, I have submitted language on our bill to straighten this out, and I hope that Congress will take a look at it down the road. I do support this amendment, however, and I thank the gentleman from California for the time.”