Harold Volkmer: “I doubt very much if we will take the full 15 minutes on this side, but, as we look at the world in which we live, it is…”

“I doubt very much if we will take the full 15 minutes on this side, but, as we look at the world in which we live, it is we in this country who enjoy the liberties of a democratic society, and under our Constitution, and we try to provide that same type of freedom throughout the world for other peoples and re-review what is going on in other parts of the world, in other countries, and we have some reservations about the democratization process that is evolving in those countries, and at the same time we are asking our taxpayers to provide funds to those countries even though the people, many of them, do not have the freedoms that we believe that they should enjoy. One of the main reasons I say that I offer to develop this amendment on Kenya, and we can do it on Indonesia and several others countries in the world, is that early on in debate on this bill we had an amendment up concerning a very small Caribbean nation of Haiti, and, as a result of that, we had a long discussion, about 6 hours, on the democratization process that is ongoing in this small nation, a few people, and it just started, and yet we can look around the world, as I have done, and I find that we have a process, been ongoing for a longer period of time, that is not near the part and the place where it is in Haiti, and yet no one on this committee, no one in this Congress, not one person, has offered to say, 'Hey, we should cut off aid unless such and such is done.' So for that reason I decide…”