Sam Brownback: “I rise in opposition to that amendment and I wanted to indicate why. First, I want to indicate how we got to the point…”

“I rise in opposition to that amendment and I wanted to indicate why. First, I want to indicate how we got to the point we are today. There were a number of people who came forward to say this is a huge bill-- and it is. This is too much. I think we should examine that issue. I hope nobody says we should not be paying, because we have started down this road sometime back and it was the Congress that started down this road, not the administration. It was the Congress that started down this road. I think we now need to see this on through or we could leave the situation that we in the Congress started in a worse position than it was when we got into this in the first place. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998. This was the vote in the House of Representatives: 360 to 38. The Senate, by unanimous consent, passed this bill, the Iraq Liberation Act. What did it call for? It called for regime change in Iraq. This was signed into law by President Clinton. We allocated, authorized, and appropriated $100 million to spend on this effort of regime change in Iraq.”