John Spratt: “I offer this motion simply to ask the House to stand by a bipartisan compromise that we struck last May in marking up…”

“I offer this motion simply to ask the House to stand by a bipartisan compromise that we struck last May in marking up the defense authorization bill, the bill we are now sending formally to conference which deals with the development of low-yield nuclear weapons. Members of the House may have read, they may have heard that the Bush administration is pushing to repeal the so-called ban on low-level nuclear weapons research. They disavow any intention of building such weapons, but they at least seek the flexibility to conduct research in that realm. Let me tell everybody, they basically won that argument. Both the House and the Senate defense authorization bills propose changes to current law that allow the flexibility of research into low-yield nuclear weapons. The administration said this was a problem, the Department of Energy said it was a problem, existing law, so we have changed it. We have addressed the problem. I was an author of the so-called Spratt-Furse amendment in 1993. I believe that the language of that amendment as it now stands as amended in the committee mark is sensible and a fair compromise. That is what I am asking the House to do, to stand behind it.”