Jack Kingston: “today we have before us the defense reauthorization bill, and it is a very important bill in that it reverses the trend…”

“today we have before us the defense reauthorization bill, and it is a very important bill in that it reverses the trend of massive defense cuts. Now it is interesting, as we go into the debate, actually on the eve of the debate, we have the Democrat Majority Leader speaking basically the Democrat policy on defense which was we have got to have a combination of taking money, and I am going to paraphrase it, but when he says taking it out, taking money out of defense and raising revenue, raising taxes. We can argue about how to do that, closing loopholes or even raising taxes to do it, but the point is here we have a defense, and I will show my colleagues another chart which traces defense spending under the Clinton administration, particularly since 1993, how it has been cut massively during the period of time that we have had increased deployments, we have had equipment that lacks spare parts, we need modernization, and we are losing lots of good soldiers because the quality of life has gone down so much. But despite this decrease, the Majority Leader of the Democrat party is saying again we need to squeeze it out of defense, we need to cut defense spending, and this in the face of a President who is selling missile technology to China. Madam Speaker, it does not make sense. I hope people will support this bill, and I hope that we can get the Democrats to join us.”