longer.blue

Rep Adam Smith: Yesterday I voted against the defense authorization bill. I didn't do that lightly. Here's the problem: Congress just approved $1.6 trillion in defense spending—a 60 percent increase—at a time when our country is running a nearly $2 trillion deficit. We're doing that while cutting taxes, cutting Medicaid, cutting SNAP, and telling Americans struggling with housing costs that we can't afford to invest in them. It's not a reasonable thing to ask. And then there's the war in Iran. We stumbled into that conflict in what I can only describe as the dumbest way imaginable. The president's plan was simple: bomb Iran for four weeks and they'll give up. His own administration told him it wouldn't work. He did it anyway. And now we're living in an alternative universe where the Pentagon tells us the Iranian military is completely defeated—yet the missiles and drones keep coming, our service members keep dying, and there's no plan to end it. The bill also came loaded with toxic partisan amendments attacking the LGBTQ+ community. No Democratic amendments were even allowed for debate. I believe in the budget process. I believe in working with people across the aisle. But I can't support a bill that asks working Americans to sacrifice while we hand a blank check to a war with no end in sight.