Despite Georgia's Senate delegation's failure to keep the funding going for the Marietta made F-22 Raptor, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) are claiming victory for the Peach State overall, in allocation of defense dollars.
Chambliss, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had been able to add a request for seven additional planes to the original bill, despite threats of a White House veto, but the spending bill was amended on the Senate floor, and the provision for the additional aircraft was cut.
FILE: A U.S. soldier patroling outside a home in
the Shiite enclave of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq,
June 28, 2009. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
added a provision to the 2010 Defense Appro-
priations Bill that would strengthen the voting
regulations for deployed military personnel.
(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)
The silver lining for Georgia is over $800 million in military construction (MILCON) for military facilities across the state, and $30.4 million for privately contracted military technology projects like lithium-ion batteries for aircraft, and bone and tissue regeneration to treat wounded soldiers. (A list of the MILCON and technology spending for Georgia is posted here, in a subsequent post.)
The biggest success, Chambliss says, is the Military and Overseas Voters Empowerment Act, an amendment he and Isakson co-sponsored, which requires that states make sure soldiers in the field receive their ballots in a timely manner and that those ballots are counted. "I’m glad my colleagues recognized that our military men and women serving overseas to defend and promote our national values at very least deserve to participate in the electoral process," the senior senator said in a statement released Thursday.
- The list of highlights of Georgia's share of the 2010 defense appropriations bill is available in a subsequent post.
- The Atlanta Political Buzz Examiner has much more detail about the MOVE legislation in a recent article.
- For further description of what Georgia's Senate delegation was able to include, see Sen. Isakson's complete press release.
Comments
Chambliss' and Isakson's next masterpiece of legislation will be the "Wounded soldier care act". This bold measure will make it mandatory that all wounded soldiers receive medical attention.
Isakson and Chambliss are frauds.
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