WASHINGTON – Today, Dave Obey, Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee, delivered the following statement during the debate on the bill to fund homeland security.

“I am pleased to be able to support this bill. I very much regret the fact that we will only have completed two out of the eleven appropriations bills by the end of the fiscal year. That, in my view, is not the fault of the Appropriations Committee on either side of the aisle. It is very much the fault of the fact that this institution chose to adopt a budget resolution which did not accurately reflect the political center of gravity in the Republican Party, much less the Democratic Party, when you take a look at the positions of each house.

“Having said that, I want to take the opportunity to comment on something the president said yesterday. The president told the country that those of us on this side of the aisle were in effect soft on security and soft on defending this country.

“I regret very much that the president has chosen to govern this country by dividing it rather than uniting it. I took a great deal of pleasure in working with the President’s father, in working out many a legislative compromise. We did the same thing with President Clinton, we did the same thing with Presidents Carter, we even on many occasions did the same thing with President Regan and President Nixon.

“But this is the first president I’ve known who has seemed to purposefully divided the country in order to govern.

“I just want to trace what the facts are with respect to defending the homeland.

“I remember in August of 2001, while I was at home in Wisconsin, receiving a call from my Staff Director, telling me he had just been briefed by the CIA and that they were extremely concerned about the traffic that they were intercepting around the world and they thought something big was up. They didn’t know if it was domestic or international, but the intelligence community was very worried that something was coming. That was in August, just before 9/11.

“The day before 9/11, Attorney General Ashcroft met with his staff to set out their priorities for the year. And in that meeting, he was presented a spread sheet with various boxes he could check to indicate which would be his preferred activities and activities of focus for the coming year. He declined to check any of the boxes that had anything to do with anti-terrorism. He was urged by his staff to reconsider and rejected that advice. He told his staff ‘No I want to focus on drugs.’

“The attorney general denied that in a hearing of our committee, but in fact, my office had been leaked the documents by his own agency that showed exactly what he had done in that meeting.

“Then, after we were hit by anthrax. I called Bill Young who was then chairman of the full committee and suggested that since we couldn’t get into our offices we talk to the security agencies to see what they felt they needed in order to respond to the threat represented by 9/11. We talked to the FBI, the NSA, the CIA you name it - all of the security agencies. On a bi-partisan basis we put together a listing of action items and then we cut it and we cut it and then we went to see the president.

“He came into the room, and before we could say a word he said, ‘I understand that some of you want to spend more money than I have requested for homeland security. My good friend Mitch Daniels here from OMB tells us that we have enough money in our budget. I want you to know that if you appropriate a dollar more than we asked for I’ll veto the bill. Now I have time for 4 or 5 comments and I’m out of here.’

“Senator Stevens said ‘Mr. President, I don’t think you understand, we have already agreed we will knock off any item you don’t want. We’re not trying to have an argument we just want to get something done.’ Senator Byrd made the same point.

“Then I said: ‘Mr. President, I have been coming down here for 30 years, and this is the first time that any president has told me that his mind was closed before the subject was even opened. I want to ask you four questions about federal installations which we have been told by your own security people are gravely of risk of terrorist attack - their words, not mine.’ I asked him about them, it was clear he hadn’t been briefed on them, I didn’t expect him to, he is a busy man.

“After being told by the president that he would veto any additional for homeland security, we went back to up Capitol Hill and eventually added more than $2 billion to the president’s request and he signed the bill.

“The following year the president held a press conference bragging about the fact that the customs agency had this new port security arrangement, new inspection of cargo coming into this country. He had a press conference bragging about it and then pocket vetoed the money to make it happen. I felt that that was enough to give hypocrisy a bad name.

“That is the early history of the president’s record of resisting bipartisan efforts to strengthen homeland security funding.

“I remember going out to the CIA and watching in real time as we could see what the Predators were flying over in Afghanistan when they were looking for bin Laden. And I know what the CIA people thought about the President’s decision divert a significant portion of our resources from the job of nailing bin Laden to the job of preparing for the war in Iraq. They were not happy about it and neither were we.

“And since that time, on seven different occasions on this side of the aisle we have tried to add funding to the President’s budget for homeland security and to the committee budget.

“I want to be clear, I think the subcommittee has done the best it could given the allocation that it was given under the Republican budget, but that doesn’t mean that the allocation was adequate.

“The record is clear, the president on numerous occasions, offered inadequate budgets which had to be augmented by this committee on a bipartisan basis. And I think it comes with considerable ill grace and with considerable reinventing of history for the president to suggest that there is any difference of opinion between the two parties with respect to our dedication to protecting the homeland. He knows it isn’t so, but campaign rhetoric is getting in the way of the facts as far as he is concerned.

“I don’t question the president’s patriotism, because he chose to put tax cuts as a higher priority than even additional funding for homeland security. That is a judgment he made, that is a judgment he will have to defend. I don’t question his patriotism, I question his judgment.

“I think that it comes from considerable ill grace for a man who has the track record of refusing the efforts of this Congress to strengthen homeland security on various occasion, to have that man question anybody else’s dedication to this country, to question anybody else’s dedication to defending this country.

“The record does not bear out his claims and I think if you check the record you will find that every statement that I made today is fully true and accurate. I thank the gentleman for his time.”