Press Releases
January 29, 2008
Webb: Commission On Wartime Contracting Will Move Forward In Expeditious Manner
President Issues "Signing Statement" to FY08 Defense Authorization Bill Purporting that Commission Inhibits Ability to Wage War
Washington, DC- Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) took to the Senate floor today to dispute President Bush’s assertion that the recently approved Webb-McCaskill Commission on Wartime Contracting was beyond the constitutional authority of the Congress.
Stating that the Commission, signed into law last night by the President in the National Defense Authorization Act, will “march forward in an expeditious manner,” Webb questioned why President Bush saw fit to issue a signing statement critical of a bipartisan body intended to make government more accountable to the American taxpayer.
In his signing statement, the President singled out four of 2,887 sections in the bill, including the section creating the Wartime Contracting Commission, claiming that they could inhibit the President’s ability to execute his authority as commander in chief.
The Commission is modeled after the “Truman Committee” which investigated defense contracts during World War II and was credited with savings of $15 billion (1943 dollars) in taxpayer dollars. Similarly, the Webb-McCaskill measure is designed to address the systematic problems associated with the federal government’s wartime-support, reconstruction, and private security contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Those of us in Congress have an obligation to the American taxpayer to be proper stewards of their tax dollars,” said Webb. “I look forward to working with the Administration and my colleagues in Congress to ensure that the Commission comes to life as quickly as possible.”
Senator Webb delivered the following remarks today from the Senate floor, with respect to the Commission on Wartime Contracting and the President’s signing statement:
“Yesterday, the President signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, and with it a Commission on Wartime Contracting, which Senator McCaskill and I jointly introduced early last year. This is a very important piece of legislation.
“It will put into place an independent bipartisan Commission, with a two-year sunset date, jointly selected by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and the House and by the Administration. This is to be a Commission filled with experts, not of Senators or political people, to examine wartime contracting that has taken place since our invasion of Iraq. It will play a major role in remedying a broad range of fraud, waste, and abuse that we all know has occurred during this period.
“Now, to my surprise, when the President signed this legislation yesterday, he issued a signing regarding the Wartime Contracting Commission, saying, that it ‘purports to impose requirements that could inhibit the President's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief.’ He goes on to say, ‘The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.’
“In other words, the President of the United States—who has been in charge of the conduct of this war and whose administration has been in charge of executing these contracts, supervising them, making sure that they meet the requirements of fairness in the law—is now saying that he believes that a legislative body can enact a law that he can choose to ignore because he says it would interfere with his responsibility to supervise a war as Commander-and-Chief.
“I am at a total loss here. I am amazed to see this kind of language employed with respect to this legislation.
“The Commission was put into place with broad bipartisan and bicameral support, with the intention of studying systemic problems. I would think that these are the sorts of problems that this President would want to root out.
“The Commission’s historic precedent goes back to the Truman Committee of World War II. Then-Senator Harry Truman wanted to look at wartime waste, fraud, and abuse so that the American government could get a proper handle on the federal spending that was going into mobilization and the projects that were being put on the line. And we certainly didn’t see President Franklin Roosevelt trying to say that the Truman Committee’s work was going to interfere with his ability to conduct World War II.
“To the contrary, the President, during that war, saw that this was the type of thing that he needed in order to bring the right sort of supervision and the right sort of accountability that might eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse.
“We don’t quite know what the Administration intends with this sort of language, but I want all my colleagues to be aware of it and to be aware that it potentially is an impingement on the rights of this legislative body—in effect saying that the President has the authority to ignore a law that is now passed, a law that he has now signed.
“We are going to go forward with this Commission. We are going to work with the Administration, we hope, to set it up. We are going to move as rapidly as we can, because the clock is ticking in terms of the statute of limitations on some of the charges that might be filed.
“And I would hope that the people of this country understand that we want to do this for the good of the American people. We have a responsibility to make sure that the nation’s purse strings have been properly taken care of and that we are acting as proper stewards of America’s taxpayers.
“If the Administration would like to explain to us what their constitutional issue is with a piece of legislation that the President has just signed, we would be happy to hear that. In the meantime, we are moving forward with this Commission. It is vitally important to accountability in the government, and I’m very proud to have introduced it. We are marching forward. And with that I yield the floor.”
To download the audio from Senator Webb’s floor speech, please go to: http://demradio.senate.gov/actualities/webb/webb080129.mp3
To watch the video of Senator Webb’s floor speech, please go to: http://democrats.senate.gov/av/webb/012908webb.rm
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