Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, today is a very important day. Today, the House is debating on a continuing resolution and also an amendment to that resolution which would authorize under title 10 the expenditure of $500 million to train moderate Syrian opposition forces.

This is not an authorization for the use of military force. It is just simply for the limited purpose which I just stated, but I feel compelled to go a little bit further as to why it is necessary that we be in favor of that amendment to the CR as well as the CR itself.

If we do nothing against the ISIL threat, if we choose to be isolationists and take a wait-and-see attitude, the chances are great that the situation will get worse. When it gets worse, that means ISIL gets more powerful. They have been on the run lately, and they have gotten more powerful now.

I know people on the other side of the aisle will say that it is the President's fault that ISIL got this strong, but ISIL would not have gotten this strong had it not been for the instability that we created ourselves when we went into Iraq and went to war for an illegitimate purpose, and so we disrupted the stability in that region, and we are still recovering from it now.

What do we do now? I would much rather have a President that is thoughtful, deliberate, careful, and moderate in terms of the use of military force than to have a trigger-happy, shoot first, ask questions later type of President. We have seen what that got us.

Our President has taken a very reasonable, modest approach. We have not put massive amounts of armaments in Syria that could now be used against us. He was smart enough not to do that; but, now, we have the situation where, due to a number of forces outside of our control, ISIL has gotten bigger, has gotten more menacing, has gotten stronger, and it is a distant threat to our homeland, but it is a threat.

What do you do when the wolf is barking out, saying, ``I'm coming to get you,'' what do you do?

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What do you do when the wolf is in front of the door? Do you move back from the door and then kneel down and pray and hope that everything is okay? Or do you take some action?

In this kind of situation, the wolf is not at the door yet, but the wolf is coming. The wolf has told you that he is coming. There is a lot of logic into taking preemptive measures to make sure that the wolf does not come to the door.

I would rather have the fight there than have it here. The limited fight that we are going to do is the use of our air power, once we train what is called moderate Syrians--opposition.

I don't know how that is going to turn out, but I do know that we have no choice but to do something. We must build up the ground forces over there with our partner nations to enter the fight on the ground. We support them.

I support this resolution offered by the chairman of the HASC Committee.

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