Chair, I'm a bit confused insofar as it seems like there may be a wire crossed a bit on the government side. Currently in law, there is not a prohibition on investments in cluster munitions.
This bill is aimed at combatting cluster munitions by prohibiting those investments. We have, in off-line conversation with members of the committee, gotten the sense that there are some concerns on the government side that this prohibition may inappropriately target those who are inadvertently investing in broader indexes, without their knowledge.
Therefore, this amendment is designed to allay a concern with the original draft of the bill that was raised by members of the government.
If that's no longer a concern, then that's fine, I suppose, but absent our efforts in putting forward this bill in the first place, there would be no prohibition on investments in cluster munitions.
For members to suggest that somehow this is about making things easier for investment in cluster munitions—far from it. That's not the purpose of the bill. Moreover, if members want to defeat this amendment and leave in place the original text of the bill, which is a broader prohibition on cluster munitions, that was our original position. It was only through conversation with members of the government that we said we'd put in this exception for these exceptional circumstances.
This is where the points that are made today are a little bit discordant with things we've heard before, but we can proceed either way, as far as I'm concerned.