Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 4205, the Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 Conference Report. While Federal constitutional authority clearly exists to provide for the national defense, global militarism was never contemplated by the founders. Misnamed like most everything else in Washington, the ‘Defense’ Authorization Act thus funds U.N.-directed peacekeeping in Kosovo and Bosnia to the tune of $3.1 billion dollars, $443 million in aid to the former Soviet Union, $172 million for NATO infrastructure (the formerly defensive alliance which recently initiated force against Kosovo), and $869 million for drug interdiction efforts by the U.S. military in an attempt to take our failed 1920′s prohibition experiment worldwide.

Certainly a bill authorizing use of resources for the national defense which also properly compensates those military personnel necessary to maintain it would be not only constitutional but most appropriate. Contrarily, a bill which continues our elitist and failed policy of policing the world all the while creating additional enemies of the United States is neither constitutional, justifiable, supportable, nor prudent. By avoiding such a police-the-world approach, which destroys troop morale by isolating them from their families and spreading them dangerously thin, considerably less money could be authorized with seriously improved security results.

Meanwhile, H.R. 3769, my bill to prohibit the destruction during fiscal year 2001 of missile silos in the United States, fails to even receive so much as a hearing. While I understand that to comply with questionable, but ratified, disarmament treaties, certain missiles may need to be deactivated, it seems ill-advised to spend money to also destroy the missile silos which may be strategically vital to our national defense at some date in the not-so-distant future.

I encourage my colleagues to rethink the United States’ 20th century role of global policeman and restore instead, a policy of true national defense which will better protect their constituents, keep their constituent’s children safer and out of endless global conflicts, and reassume for taxpayers some semblance of fiscal sanity.

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