Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick: “I first want to thank our new chairman, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Kolbe), for his tenacity and his bipartisanship…”

“I first want to thank our new chairman, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Kolbe), for his tenacity and his bipartisanship as we put together a very good bill. I thank the gentleman from Arizona very much for his leadership and to our ranking member, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey), for her hard work as we worked together to craft a bill that is a good one and is also bipartisan. In the development assistance account, this bill does address the problems; and the rule that we have before us today helps to implement the bill that comes forward. In the child disease account and health account, we find that we have $1.4 billion there to begin to help with some of the diseases in the world. I wish there could have been more money for the diseases, and I am hopeful that we will work to find more money as we move into this process. Airborne diseases such as tuberculosis and others need more attention; and I would hope that as we move forward, we will be able to address more dollars into those accounts. The Andean Counterdrug Initiative. Last year, this initiative was called Plan Colombia. We put in $1.3 billion for Plan Colombia. Today, less than 25 percent of that has been spent. We hope that because 90 percent of the cocaine and heroin that comes into our country comes from Colombia that we would begin to spend this money for interdiction of these drugs and to begin to meet the drug crisis here in America. Unfortunately, it has not begun.”