David Obey: “What is more important, to adhere to an artificially imposed $20 billion spending ceiling on national security-related…”

“What is more important, to adhere to an artificially imposed $20 billion spending ceiling on national security-related items, or to do what we think is necessary today to deal with our vulnerabilities? We are told by the majority Members, wait until next year. In my view, that is a slogan more befitting a Chicago Cubs fan than it is a Member of Congress. If we take a look at what my good friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham), has said, he said that we have urgent military needs; yet we are being told that those needs have to be sacrificed to that $20 billion ceiling that we supposedly agreed to. There is no such ceiling. That ceiling is a fiction. When we agreed to supplemental funding requests after the events of September 11, we all agreed, and the President, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), and I are all on record publicly as admitting that that was simply a downpayment. It was not a final ceiling; it was a downpayment on meeting future needs. The needs are obvious. Members on both sides of the aisle know it. We are told we are supposed to wait. We are told that this money cannot be used now. Not true. We can hire more border guards now. We have had over 600 of them already cleared by the agency. They are just waiting to get the authority and the money to hire them. We can give the FBI a modern computer system now.”