On Funding Israel

On Thursday, the House voted on an appropriations bill for the State Department. H.R. 3081 provides funding for the department's operations including foreign aid. It checks in at a healthy 200 pages.

I was not following this bill or the action around it, but did catch Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) on CSPAN later that afternoon. The full text of her remarks follows (courtesy of THOMAS):

Mr. Speaker, the vote that I took this afternoon on H.R. 3081 was one of the toughest votes that I have had to take in this House since I have been here in my 4 1/2 years. The problem with the bill and with the decision that had to be made is because the bill contained funding for aid to Israel, our best friend in the world.

I have always been and will continue to be an extremely strong supporter of Israel. Israel has always been a good friend to the United States, and the people of this country and the people of Israel share the same values. However, the bill had so many flaws that it made it very difficult for a pro-life fiscal conservative such as myself to vote for the bill despite my very strong support for Israel.

The bill, when emergency supplemental funds were not taken into account, was still 32 percent more than the regular fiscal year 2009 appropriations. I am taking the liberty of using some of the figures from my colleague, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Price), which were also presented today on the floor in terms of explaining the bill that we voted on this afternoon.

We are facing a fiscal crisis in this country. This administration and this Congress, led by Speaker Pelosi, are spending this country into a terrible, terrible situation. We are mortgaging our children and grandchildren's future with excess spending; and it has to stop somewhere.

Had this bill merely contained the funding for Israel, it would have been very easy for me to have supported it, although I was quite concerned that the bill reduced the funding for Israel by 7.2 percent below last year's funding level and 23.3 percent below the request. But, as I said earlier, the total bill had an increase of 33.8 percent compared to last year.

One of the most troubling increases in this bill was a 20 percent increase to the United Nations Population Fund and a 19 percent increase to International Family Planning. The United Nations Population Fund aids China's one-child policy, coercive abortion, and sterilization. International Family Planning goes to organizations that promote and provide abortion services through International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stokes International.

In addition, the Democrats had rejected four cost-cutting Republican amendments that had been presented which could have made this bill a lot more palatable to the 97 Republicans who voted against it.

Another problem with the bill is that there was a false assumption that the Obama administration will live up to its promise of no more war supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan. The President has gone back on every promise that he made during the campaign. He has already asked for a supplemental this year, says it was a carryover from last year, but that won't happen again. However, before the ink was dry on the amended full committee report of this bill, the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Congressman Murtha, publicly stated that another supplemental is necessary to fund the troops because of the low fiscal year 2010 Defense allocation.

So the promise was that all of the money for the war was going to be here and we wouldn't have to do more supplementals. That isn't going to happen.

This bill also avoids making hard fiscal choices about spending abroad while we face a financial crisis here. This is not the way we should be going. We should be funding our friends and our allies. We should be helping Israel which is the only true democracy in the Middle East and who stands by us year after year, day after day. But funding things like abortion and international family planning is not the way to go.

My translation... "Even though I voted against this, I still love Israel. Please continue to fund my campaign despite this vote!"

Interestingly, Foxx is the Republican who Ron Paul (R-TX) most often votes with. He obviously voted against the State Department funding along with 96 other Republicans and 9 Democrats.