Speech by Rep. Bruce Vento (D-Minnesota), March 29, 2000

Speech by Rep. Bruce Vento (D-Minnesota), March 29, 2000
[Page: H1513]

Mr. VENTO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this Emergency Supplemental Appropriation bill. While I support the necessary emergency funding needs in this supplemental request, I have found numerous reasons to vote against it.

H.R. 3908 provides over $9 billion in so called emergency funds for this year. In fact, $3.8 billion, or 73% more than originally requested by the President. This bill provides $5 billion for ongoing operations in Kosovo, $2.2 billion for natural disaster assistance, $2 billion additional funds for the Defense Department, $1.7 billion in Colombian assistance and various other initiatives.

This funding runs the risk of repeating past mistakes in Latin America. The supplemental funds will not achieve our objectives of combating drug trafficking and political violence or enhancing peace efforts in Colombia. $1.1 billion or 65% of the total request for Colombia will go to their abusive military regime. Training Colombian army battalions for counter narcotics efforts and to strengthen democratic institutions is contradictory. In fact, aid to the Colombian army will without doubt worsen the human rights situation and will drag the United States further into a long-term counterinsurgency commitment.

The Colombian military continues to maintain close regional and local links with the primary agents of violence and disorder in this region--paramilitary groups. According to the Washington Office on Latin America, the paramilitary groups are well known to be involved in the drug trade and responsible for over 70% of human rights violations. The paramilitaries continues to thwart and attack government investigators, reformist politicians and human rights monitors. Punctuating this, the Washington Post reports today that paramilitary rebels killed at least 24 policeman and soldiers in a small village outside of Bogota in a series of attacks since this past weekend.

With such a relationship documented it makes no sense to factor in U.S. dollars into this equation. Rather, we must focus upon alternatives to military aid such as economic assistance, micro-credit loans, social services programs, judicial reform, drug prevention education and humanitarian relief for the approximately one million Colombians displaced by violence in the last five years.

The roughly $1.6 billion allotted for the military to pay for rising fuel costs, $855 million for military health care and the $134 million for repairing damages to military facilities caused by recent hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters is understandable. These are truly unforeseen costs for the most part. However, an amendment being proposed by Chairman Young and Chairman Spence, would give the Pentagon an additional $4 billion for special interest projects. This is not only bad policy, but drains resources away from human needs and people programs. Such initiatives and decisions should be part of the regular 2000 appropriation process rather than trying to slip under the past and current year DOD spending agreements. This bill would already reduce the non-Social Security budget surplus for this year by about 35%. So much for the Congressional pledges to pay down the debt.

Too often under this GOP leadership, the term `emergency' is misunderstood and misused. This Emergency Supplemental request is not an opportunity to beef up the Pentagon with rancid pork projects for special interests. Nor is it the vehicle to load down with extraneous riders in effort to avoid the regular appropriation cycle. H.R. 3908 could have provided real help to those in need. Sadly, the Majority is failing this simple task.

I urge all Members to join me in voting no against this measure. As much as we need the fuel and energy assistance and other emergency help, the Congress and the American people should not be forced fed and blackmailed into spending billions on lousy policy and unneeded, unreviewed policy from the Administration or the congressional power brokers. Let's say no.

As of March 30, 2000, this document was also available online at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r106:H29MR0-173: