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By Congressman Roy Blunt Posted in Congress — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

It took them more than a month to write, more than a week to schedule, and more than a few appendages to break, but Democratic leaders this afternoon will finally get down to marking-up the desperately needed emergency funding package for our men and women in the field.

The spinach field, that is. And the peanut plot too.

House Republicans asked Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha to craft and deliver a clean bill of resources to support and secure our troops in harm’s way. Instead, after weeks of public recriminations and a few heated hours of private horse-trading, they came up with a package that could have just as easily been written by Popeye and Jimmy Carter as the speaker of the House and the chairman of the Defense appropriations panel.

But to be fair, it appears that Democrats had more on their minds in writing this bill than legumes and roughage. Also included in the “omni-mental,” as I’ve come to call it, are $5 million for fish importers around the Great Lakes, a minimum wage mandate on all U.S. territories except the one that does business with a major firm in San Francisco, and a full $50 million to remove asbestos paneling in the Capitol.

Read on . . .



Setting aside the question of whether asbestos removal is a project requiring urgent attention, I’m still scratching my head as to why we couldn’t make that decision through the regular and ongoing appropriations process. But here we are today, cluttering up an urgent deployment of resources and equipment to the frontlines with a contract to tear down old walls and a relief package for salmon farmers.

Look hard enough, and somewhere in this bill you will locate the funding provisions for our troops. But you have to dig deep, and you have willfully ignore the language attached to it that declares America’s mission in Iraq over and the troops’ continued status there without merit. You’d have to look past the reams of reporting requirements to which General Petraeus and his commanders on the ground will have to submit, and you’d have to reconcile the date-certain timetables they’ve helpfully included to guide the precipitous withdrawal of support forces from the region – as early as June, they say.

But as bad as this bill may be, and it’s certainly that, keep a close eye on Chairman Obey and his restless band of appropriators this week – especially Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-Ill. If they have their way, and they just might, the committee print we see today might not even come close to resembling the engrossed copy on which we will vote later in the month. It could be even worse.

However it turns out, though, Republicans have made clear that nothing short of straight-up, no-strings-attached supplemental bill will be acceptable to our caucus. Their position, needless to say, is a bit more complicated. Let me know if you come across someone who can explain it.