David Obey: “this country is now engaged in a two-front war. In Afghanistan itself, the war in many places seems to be going well.…”

“this country is now engaged in a two-front war. In Afghanistan itself, the war in many places seems to be going well. The President, the Pentagon, our intelligence agencies and other agencies are doing their job well. We also have a second war, and that is the war on the home front. In my view, not nearly enough is being done to provide domestic security at a time when we are under attack from terrorism. We have a large number of vulnerabilities. Two weeks ago this Congress passed a tax bill which gave $25 billion in retroactive tax cuts to the largest corporations in this country, repealing all of the taxes those corporations had paid over the past 15 years, retroactively. As a result, one corporation got $1.4 billion in a tax gift. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the White House's budget arm, seemed to think we had plenty of room to afford that kind of giveaway. Yet the Office of Management and Budget, the fiscal arm of the White House, is trying to block, along with the leadership of this House, our ability to even get a vote on an effort to add $7 billion to the security on the home front, that I think we desperately need.”