Russ Feingold: “What the amendment would do is remove the emergency designation from the Bosnia money that is in this bill. There are…”

“What the amendment would do is remove the emergency designation from the Bosnia money that is in this bill. There are various pots of money in this bill, but I am only talking here about the Bosnia money concerning the operation in the Bosnia theater. If the Senate determines that these funds are not an emergency--if I am able to prevail in this amendment--then they would be treated like any other kind of spending, any other kind of regular spending. In other words, under this scenario, if the administration wants to have these expenditures, they would have to follow the regular procedure. That is, the administration and the Members of Congress would have to find an offset from within the budget caps for these defense expenditures. Otherwise, these defense expenditures would be sequestered. The reason I am offering this is that the emergency designation as drafted in this bill for the Bosnia funding is really just a way around spending caps. In my mind, it is a ruse. It is just a budget fiction. It means we are ignoring our own budget caps.”