Speech by Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wisconsin), July 24, 2001

Speech by Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wisconsin), July 24, 2001
Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word, and I rise in support of the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, Congress's record in handling this issue is a sorry one indeed, and I think it institutionally ought to be ashamed of itself for its total lack of guts in defending our obligations under the Constitution and our prerogatives under the Constitution. Basically, we are engaged in a war a long ways away in Colombia, rather than engaging in that war on our own streets here at home. We cannot do much about that today under the rules under which we are being forced to debate this bill.

But I want to be very blunt about what I think is happening. We are right now engaged in this war, even though this Congress never had an intelligent, thoughtful debate through the normal processes of this House. We are not operating under an authorization produced by the authorizing committee. We are operating under a political compromise fashioned by the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, and the present Speaker of the House, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. HASTERT), and rammed through this House on both sides of the aisle with no real ability of the authorizing committee to effect in any way the outcome.

With all due respect to the Committee on Appropriations on which I have served for over 30 years, that is not the job of the Committee on Appropriations. The job of the Committee on Appropriations is to fund programs previously authorized, and certainly it is not the job of the Committee on Appropriations to get this country in a position where we could inadvertently be sucked into a conflict that could keep us there for years.

The question is not whether we like the rebels in Colombia and the question is not whether we like the President of Colombia; the question is whether or not we believe that that society, as presently constituted and constructed and organized, has the ability to make what we are doing in this program work and, in my view, based on long observations of that society, I do not believe that that is the case.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to quote something said by Jim Hoagland, who I think can accurately be described as a moderate conservative columnist in The Washington Post. This is what he wrote a year ago. ``In Colombia, the United States pursues unattainable goals, largely for domestic political reasons with inappropriate tools.'' Then he says, ``Now in the rush to the quagmire, we see the following:'' and then he goes on to talk about what happens when it becomes clear that in the considered judgment of the U.S., air force officers in the Colombian military will not be able to maintain the Blackhawks under the conditions in which they will be flying has shown to be correct. He asked what will happen then. Then he simply goes on to make the point that the Congress is slipping us into this war little by little the way that Kennedy and Johnson did in Vietnam, and we all know what the disastrous results were of that operation.

I am also frankly mystified by the views of our new Drug Czar, John Walters. Walters was quoted a year ago as attacking the idea that we ought to focus on drug treatment. When he was discussing the value of that idea he said this: ``This is an ineffectual policy, the latest manifestation of the liberals' commitment to a `therapeutic state' in which government serves as the agent of personal rehabilitation.''

I find that comment to be condescending and arrogant and, most of all, misguided. The fact is that if we take a look at the research done by SAMHSA, the agency charged with knowing what we are doing on drug treatment and rehabilitation, if we take a look at studies done by RAND, financed, in part, by the U.S. Army, they estimate that a dollar spent on treatment here at home is 23 times as effective as fighting a war or trying to interdict drugs internationally.

Mr. Chairman, I am for doing both, but I am not for spending over $1 billion last year and almost that amount this year over 1,000 miles away from home when we still have drug addict after drug addict roaming the streets of our cities untreated and unable to get into the drug treatment programs that we have provided in this country, simply because this Congress is too misguided and does not provide the money.

It seems to me that this amendment is a token effort at what we ought to do on this program, and I, for one, intend to support it. I have no illusion that it is going to pass, but it is what we ought to do and, most of all, this Congress ought to have a full-blown, detailed debate on this issue after we have had briefings from the administration and others so that we know what the facts are on the ground and we are operating on the basis of facts, not ideology, or operating on the basis of substance, not politics. I think the leadership of both parties has been disgracefully negligent in getting us to drift into this war without any real thought about what the outcome is going to be.

As of October 3, 2001, this document was also available online at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/B?r107:@FIELD(FLD003+h)+@FIELD(DDATE+20010724)