Speech by Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin), June 28, 2005

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I find this debate most interesting, especially the statement made by the previous speaker, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica). It has been my experience on this floor through the years that the most baffling moments come not when we are talking about things we do not know, but when we are talking about things that we do know that ``ain't'' so.

I think the gentleman from Florida just illustrated what I mean. He stood here on the floor and suggested that somehow those of us on this side of the aisle who are skeptical about Plan Colombia had blocked all kinds of initiatives. He also suggested that this plan was a plan which had been forged into a successful program by President Bush and Speaker Hastert.

Well, the fact is that I remember when Plan Colombia was first pushed through the Committee on Appropriations, because I opposed it vehemently. I thought, based on my experience in chairing the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, for 10 years, that our drug interdiction programs were largely a flop. I know that I had officials from the Reagan administration tell me privately that we had intercepted less than 5 percent of the drugs that came across the southern borders from not just Mexico, but from elsewhere in this hemisphere.

I would ask what initiatives did we block? I wish we had blocked some, but what I remember is getting run over. And I was not run over by President Bush and Speaker Hastert, I was run over by President Clinton and Speaker Hastert. They were the two who pushed it down the throats of the Committee on Appropriations, each trying to compete with each other to show who was most zealous in their resistance to the drug problem.

So I would simply say I do not mind each of us rewriting a little history, if it is on purpose, but I hate to see history being rewritten by accident. That gets to be more than a little dangerous.

So I would simply suggest that on the merits, this program has had a long time to prove itself. In the end, the only way it could succeed is if you had a Colombian society that was determined to make it succeed, and that society has not been willing to do that. They have not been able to muster the forces necessary to deal with the problem effectively.

So we are left to ask what is ordinarily spoken of as a good conservative question, and that question would be: No matter how desirable this program is, does it work? And the answer is clear. This program has, at best, had only marginal success, very hard to see certainly, night or day. So I would simply suggest that with all of our challenges in the foreign aid area, even if we confine those challenges just to the Western Hemisphere, there are a lot of other places where we could more productively spend this money than we are in this initiative.

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