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Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Ross very much. It is always a pleasure to be on the floor with you and my other colleagues in the Blue Dog Coalition.

I would like to maybe start just responding to what we are doing so that we can set the stage properly for the American people who are watching to understand why we are doing this and the important confirmation that we have for doing it that is embedded deep in the Constitution of the United States.

The question on what role does Congress have in this has been put before pundits and before commentators, news articles once the President made his statement about the surge, and I, too, want to go on record as saying that I oppose this surge, almost exclusively because of the strain that it is placing on our military, which is already overstrained, and taking our young men and women and not only just putting them in harm's way, but placing them in the cross-hairs of a civil war.

But fundamentally, as I mentioned earlier, what this legislation is that we are here to bring some transparency and to bring some understanding of how the taxpayers' money is being spent is embedded, as I said early, deep into the Constitution.

Now, I want everybody to understand that when we put forward this bill, we are not putting it forward based upon what we feel like today. We are putting this forward so that we can be responsive to the job that we were created to do.

In Article I in Section 8 of the Constitution, it states clearly, when that question was put to James Madison and to Alexander Hamilton at the beginning of the formation of the Continental Army, the fight for the freedom of this country at the very beginning, the question was this: Who has the authority to declare war; who has the authority to raise and support our military? Here is what it says in Article I, Section 8, that was written well over 200 years ago.

Article I, Section 8, gives Congress, not the White House, not the executive branch, not the President, it says clearly it gives Congress the power to ``raise and support armies.'' Those words are in there. In other words, it gives Congress the exclusive power to appropriate the funds for war and then to determine the manner in which those funds are handled and used.

That is what undergirds our resolution that we are putting forth as Blue Dogs and as Democrats and as Republicans, because I believe that we will get bipartisan support for standing up and finally allowing this Congress to do what the Founding Fathers put us here to do.

Just for a moment, our war in Iraq has been prosecuted at a tremendous cost to our Nation, a tremendous cost in terms of especially our soldiers' lives, and we cannot thank our soldiers enough for the sacrifice that they have given, but also the strain that it has placed on their families through repeated and increasingly hefty deployments, wear and tear on our equipment and, of course, the taxpayers' money.

That is what the Founding Fathers said when they said raise and support our Army. They just did not say tax the money. It did not say that. It said raise and support, which means put your arms around it and make sure you take care of your Army.

I will tell you, up to this point this Congress has not done so. The strain on our military is extraordinary. Our service members, as we know, are all volunteers. They and their families are more than willing to sacrifice, as they have and as they will continue to do, for the good of our Nation, and the American public at large is also willing to allow its tax dollars to be spent on a worthy cause. However, we in Congress owe it to the whole country to make sure that our service members are not sacrificing needlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that tax money is not being squandered.

The American public and Members of Congress have largely not been aware of exactly where the money is going, where the funding that we are providing has been going, and there is widespread reports of contractor fraud. There is bribery, there is waste, there is theft of reconstruction funds for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the reason it has been is because we have not fulfilled Article I in Section 8 which gives Congress the power to raise and support our armies and determine how this money is being spent, because this Congress, up to now, has rolled over and given this President everything he asked for without asking the questions because they have allowed him to use the emergency supplemental funding process.

For those in America and those on C-SPAN, what that means is that that is a type of funding that prohibits us in Congress from doing exactly what the Founding Fathers said we must do in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, and that is to raise and support armies and determine how this money is being spent.

It is because this administration has used the dubious practice of emergency supplementals to fund the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan away from congressional oversight, that is why we have had fraud.

That is why we have had bribery. Emergency supplementals do not go through the normal budgeting and appropriations cycle.

The administration has also not been forthcoming in providing the detail as to what specifically the funds in the supplemental budget request is being used for, and as a result, Members of Congress typically have not had the opportunity to scrutinize the request thoroughly. Supplementals are considered on an expedited basis and basically a sight unseen.

That is why what the Blue Dogs are doing with our resolution is so important. It pulls the covers off and it says let the Congress do the job that the Founding Fathers put us here to do.

One more point I want to make in the Iraq Study Group report that came out, it recognized this problem, and it mentions briefly the issue of budgeting for Operation Iraqi Freedom, and specifically they recommended that funding be placed back in the regular budget process, away from the supplemental, saying that this should be done to increase transparency and accountability. The Blue Dogs are taking that recommendation and doing with it what was recommended, and for those of you that have that report, you might find that recommendation on page 59 and 60. It is recommendation 72.

So, to correct this problem, we in the Blue Dog Coalition are introducing this bill. As Mr. Ross said, we will be doing it later this week. This bill will allow the Members of Congress the time and the information required to provide proper oversight of defense spending and contracting, and it will allow us the time to apply the new PAYGO rules recently passed by the House of Representatives, and, most importantly, it will allow the American people, that is what this election was about, it was about this country and this country taking this country back and putting into practice those things that the Founding Fathers gave us to do, and in the process the American people will become more fully educated on the true costs of this war and the sacrifices they are making and make sure that this money goes where it is supposed to go, and will hopefully, prayerfully bring our sons and daughters, our husbands and our wives, our fathers and our mothers back home safe as soon as we possibly can and end this war.