Coburn Urges Senate Leaders to Hold Full and Open Debate on $11 Billion Omnibus Spending Bill

Calls on Senate leaders to end obstruction of civil rights investigations, medical research, energy exploration

July 24, 2008

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) released the following statement today in advance of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s plan to consider a massive $11 billion omnibus spending bill this weekend.

“Once the Senate completes work on a meaningful energy package that will help lower the price of gas and reduce our dependence on foreign oil, I would welcome a full and open debate on Majority Leader Reid’s election-year omnibus spending bill,” Dr. Coburn said. “However, I’m troubled that on the eve of the Majority Leader’s planned weekend debate he has so far declined to accept my offers to expedite consideration of his package of unrelated bills.”

Dr. Coburn offered the following compromises to Majority Leader Reid in a July 17 letter.

     I would strongly recommend that the underlying bill or the managers’ package would include offsets that would pay for the cost of any new spending authorized by the bill by reducing lower priority federal spending elsewhere as well as an explicit assurance that there would be no limitations on energy or mineral exploration resulting from the bill. This would be my preference and would require no amendments or lengthy floor debates. It would also set an important precedent that any new spending approved by Congress will be paid for rather than continuing Congress’ “borrow and spend” policies that have resulted in a $9.5 trillion national debt. 

     If there is no willingness to pay for the cost of the omnibus, then I would request a fair amount of time to debate the contents and have the opportunity to offer a fixed number of amendments to address cost and any other related negative impact of the bill.

Some potential agreements include:

· One related amendment and one hour of debate for each $1 billion authorized in new spending by the omnibus;

· One related amendment for each new government office, government program federal commission, park, heritage area, wilderness area, or museum created by the omnibus with at least 30 minutes to debate each amendment; or

· One related amendment for each of the individual bills wrapped into the omnibus with 30 minutes of debate for each amendment.

“Senator Reid has refused to agree to any of these common sense proposals, and he has failed to provide a CBO score of this bill, as he pledged to do in a letter,” Dr. Coburn said.

“The Senate has a nine percent approval rating because its current leaders prefer demagoguery over debate and politics over progress. Many of the bills in this omnibus package are case studies in the triumph of mindless partisanship and spin over common sense solutions,” Dr. Coburn said.

“For instance, Senator Reid and others continue to claim I am blocking civil rights legislation like Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act (S. 535) when they have voted against additional funds for this effort in order to protect their pork. These Senators also continue to block a common sense compromise I offered that would allow this bill to pass today,” Dr. Coburn said.

“Senate Democrats first blocked passage of this bill in 2006 after its sponsor, Senator Jim Talent (R-MO), agreed to offset the costs of the bill. Democrats objected to this agreement because they wanted to deny Senator Talent a legislative victory in the midst of his re-election campaign,” Dr. Coburn said.

“In October 2007, Senators Reid, Durbin, Dodd and Leahy all voted against an amendment I offered to increase funds for the Department of Justice’s effort to investigate these crimes by redirecting funds from less vital special interest pork projects. Unfortunately, each of these Senators put their own pork projects ahead of victims of civil rights cases. Senator Dodd voted to protect $450,000 for a submarine at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. Senator Leahy voted to protect $300,000 for the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in Vermont for the ‘Eye-In-The-Sky’ Program. Senator Durbin voted to protect $300,000 for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago,” Dr. Coburn said. See related Amendment summary and Vote breakdown:

“Majority Leader Reid has now taken the step of effectively drawing a moral equivalence between legislation related to botanical gardens and victims of unsolved civil rights cases. The Majority Leader could pass the Emmett Till bill today if he brought it up as a stand alone bill with spending offsets I have already identified. Instead, the Majority Leader has linked the issue of unsolved civil rights cases to other causes that are unrelated and, in some cases, frivolous,” Dr. Coburn said.

“I have detailed reasons for asking for debate on each of the bills in Reid’s omnibus bill. In many cases, I support the bills in the package but believe the Senate should live within its means, like every American family, and pay for new programs by reducing spending elsewhere. Any Senator who can’t find offsets in a government that wastes $300 billion every year through fraud or duplication doesn’t deserve to be here,” Dr. Coburn said.

“Regarding the omnibus’ medical research component, I look forward to explaining why various bills in this package that could block entities like the National Institutes of Health from conducting life-saving medical research. The disease specific earmarks in the Reid’s omnibus would essentially put career politicians, congressional staffers and Washington lobbyists in charge of medical research in this country. Medical research dollars should be directed by trained scientists and physicians, not politicians, lobbyists and celebrity activists,” Dr. Coburn said.

“I hope the Majority Leader will give the American people what they deserve: legislation that allows us to live within our means, or at least a full and open debate that will allow him to explain why we should not,” Dr. Coburn said.

“Finally, what the Majority Leader defines as my unprecedented obstruction is my desire to see the number of bills that pass the Senate in secret with no debate, no amendment and no recorded vote be reduced by less than ten percent. I have supported 855 unanimous consent or ‘hotline’ requests in the 110th Congress while I am presently urging further debate on less than 80 bills. What is unprecedented, therefore, is not anyone’s obstruction but the Majority Leader’s secret spending and refusal to debate critical legislation,” Dr. Coburn said.

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Thank you to Maryann Phillips Soldiers' Angel at Landstuhl for providing these accounts and being there for the wounded. You are truly a wonderful angel. Let's get the truth of this out there folks..repost!

"I just hope these guys' wives and their children understand how courageous their husbands and dads were. They fought like warriors."

- SGT Jacob Walker

"It was some of the bravest stuff I've ever seen in my life, and I will never see it again because those guys... well, normal humans wouldn't do that. You're not supposed to do that — getting up and firing back when everything around you is popping and whizzing and trees, branches coming down and sandbags exploding and RPGs coming in over your head... It was a fistfight then, and those guys held ' em off."

- SPC Tyler Stafford

"When you ask for volunteers to run across an open field to a reinforced OP that almost everybody is injured at, and everybody volunteers, it feels good. There were a lot of guys that made me proud, putting themselves and their lives on the line so their buddies could have a chance."

- SSG Jesse Queck

SPC Gunnar Zwilling

All Sky Soldiers of Chosen Company, 2/503 Infantry Regiment (Airborne), 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team.
 
*  *  * 
 
The real story is NOT that this was a "base" - it was a small outpost of 45 men surrounded by concertina wire, with a few vehicles and fortified fighting positions.
 
The real story is NOT that the outpost was "overrun" - the truth is that 45 Heroes successfully fought off an organized attack by hundreds of heavily-armed Taliban and al Queda.
 
The real story is NOT that the outpost was "abandoned" after the attack - it was a temporary patrol base.
 
I spent days talking to the wounded paratroopers who were at Wanat during their stay at Landstuhl hospital and can vouch for everything in the following articles:
 
Interviews with several wounded Soldiers of Chosen Company while at Landstuhl hospital describing the attack.
 
Multimedia version of above interviews.

Interview with an additional wounded Soldier of Chosen providing further information on the fight.
 
Interview with the commander of the 173rd ABCT.
 
An Alamo with a Different Ending:Overwhelmingly Outnumbered Coalition Forces Repel a Complex Attack in NE
Afghanistan
 
This writeup can be found at my blog here:

http://soldiersangelsgermany.blogspot.com/2008/07/heroes-of-wanat.html
 

-
Mary Ann Phillips
Vice President, Warrior Medical Support Europe
www.soldiersangels.org

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by Jim Cardoza
July 23, 2008

August 6th will mark sixty-three years since a blinding light filled the sky above Hiroshima.  On that fateful day, the detonation of a single bomb, created a fireball wider than three football fields.  The blast heated ground temperatures to 5,000 degrees centigrade, and produced a mushroom cloud that rose nearly 20,000 feet.  In a split second, 70,000 unsuspecting people were burned, crushed or vaporized.

In the aftermath, tens of thousands were left milling about the city seeking relief from fire, shock and pain.  Many threw themselves into the Ota River which, by day’s end, was awash with thousands of corpses.

Just three days later, American forces dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on the port city of Nagasaki.  In a hellish instant, thirty percent of the city and 40,000 of its citizens ceased to exist.

The devastation resulting from the nuclear bombs was clearly of Biblical proportion.  All tolled, the loss of human life may have numbered a quarter million.

But merely rehashing the details of the nuclear destruction we imposed does not tell the whole story.  The truth is, the bombs accomplished an even greater measure of good.  Not only did they end World War II within a week, they prevented an alternative strategy from being deployed -- one which would have resulted in far more bloodshed for Japanese and Americans alike.

Many of us know about the atrocities of Nazi Germany, but fail to realize the level of brutality demonstrated by Japan between 1931 and 1945.  During those years, barbaric Japanese invaders murdered roughly 2 million civilians and tortured countless others, as they sought to conquer China.

Accounts from both Nanking and Chungking tell of episodes in which the Japanese rounded up Chinese citizens, tied them together in bunches with ropes, poured gasoline over them, and ignited them.

In December, 1937, Japan’s army finally captured Nanjing, at that time the capital of China.  In the six weeks that followed, the Japanese forces not only ravaged China’s national treasures, but conducted killing contests in which civilians were buried or burned alive, drowned, decapitated or made targets for bayonet practice. 

Like their German counterparts, they subjected children to medical experiments involving germ injections, amputations, and surgeries without anesthetic.  Sex crimes committed by Japan against the women of Asia are both numerous and well documented.  Certainly no student of history would suggest that the Japanese, who along with the Germans and Americans were frantically attempting to develop nuclear weapons, would have been morally opposed to using “the bomb” against American civilians.

In the absence of nuclear force, Americans would have been left with General George Marshall’s plan for an island-by-island invasion.  The projected cost of the mission was estimated as high as half a million American lives.

Few doubt the Japanese would have fiercely resisted such an attempt.  Like their suicide-bombing counterparts of today, they had long ago traded reason for fanaticism.

Since they believed their emperor to be divine, carrying out the wishes of the emperor was a sacred duty.  At both Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Japanese soldiers abandoned their wounded in order to virtually fight to the last man.  Many chose to be burned alive in their caves rather than concede.  The well-known Kamikaze pilots, trained in suicidal crash attacks, are the poster children for this mentality.

In phase one of Marshall’s plan, Operation Olympic, 650,000 Americans would have been sent to try to capture the island of Kyushu.  The Japanese were prepared to defend their turf with 540,000 troops and 5,000 kamikaze planes, virtually assuring a historic bloodbath.

In Operation Coronet, an assembled invasion force of two million men were deemed necessary to victoriously sustain the long, arduous drive toward Tokyo.  The Japanese government, in preparation for such an Allied invasion, added to the cataclysmic potential by supplying domestic households with guns, knives and explosives.

The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented those dreadful scenarios.  But, don’t expect America’s critics, who will use the anniversary of this occurrence to point the bony finger at Uncle Sam, to bring it up in their empty-headed, hand-wringing diatribes.

Those critics may not understand history, but they do understand human nature.  They know that it is our tendency to focus on what has occurred without considering what might have happened had the action not taken place.

Consider Iraq.  We can easily contemplate the economic costs and loss of life, as well as the myriad of other undeniable downsides of what has occurred.  However, the downside of having taken another path cannot be so easily calculated -- and is therefore, often minimized.  Such is the luxury of the critic.

When we think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we cannot help being reminded of the horrors of war.  But, no apologies from the United States are necessary.  The Japanese have only their Emperor and those who blindly followed him to blame for those fateful events in the summer of 1945.

All Americans should be grateful to President Truman for his decision to nuke Japan.  In doing so, he not only protected Americans from fanatical tyrants, but he allowed many of our fathers and grandfathers to continue living.  For that, he deserves unwavering praise.

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In a 90-minute radio interview now available online, conservative writer and Republican strategist Michael Johns says the late Tony Snow, President George W. Bush's former Press Secretary and a former Fox News anchor, will be remembered fondly as an authentic and articulate advocate of modern conservatism, and especially for his success in communicating the vital importance of the outcome of the war in Iraq to America's global security interests.

In an interview with BlogTalkRadio's Patriot Action with Wyatt and Matt, Johns discusses Snow's positive legacy, the case for John McCain in this November's U.S. Presidential election, and how conservatives are bringing constructive solutions to the most pressing public policy challenges confronting the nation. An archived recording of the July 17, 2008 interview is now available globally at: Michael Johns interview with BlogTalkRadio's Patriot Action with Wyatt and Matt.

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