Rob Andrews: “Mr. Chairman, I strongly oppose this amendment. No one can deny that there is a serious breach of U.S. security with…”

“Mr. Chairman, I strongly oppose this amendment. No one can deny that there is a serious breach of U.S. security with respect to the leak of military secrets to the People's Republic of China. The answer in my view to address that problem is to plug the leaks, punish the violators, prevent this from happening again, and to outsmart the technology which the Chinese have wrongfully obtained. The answer is not to change our form of government and replace one Secretary of Defense and one Commander in Chief with 435 Secretaries of Defense or Commanders in Chief. I believe that is the fundamental error behind this ill-conceived amendment. I would like my colleagues to consider the following not-too-unlikely scenario: A rogue state, let us say Iraq, decides it wants to plan and execute an attack on a U.S. corporation located in Beijing, in the People's Republic of China. Our intelligence community learns of this planned attack. If the DeLay amendment were the law, as I read it, the Secretary of Defense and the military would be prohibited from talking to the People's Republic of China military about responding to prevent that attack, prevented from sharing any information as to what to do about it. The principal flaw in this very flawed proposal is not simply what I believe to be its political motivation, it is also its absolute unreasonableness in implementation.”