Tom Cole

Mr. COLE

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, my friend is not impressed, and that is a fair statement, and I don't question my friend ever, but I am not impressed with legislation that can't become law because it is futile. We come down here with a lot of sound and fury, but we don't get anything done. Madam Speaker, in closing, I urge opposition to this rule. This rule will make in order for consideration two bills: H.R. 3351 and H.R. 2722. The first is a partisan appropriations bill that is marked to an unrealistic number that does not reflect agreement with Republicans or the Senate and that includes partisan policy riders that must come out before this bill can become law. Not to be outdone, H.R. 2722 is even more partisan, throwing out the traditional ability of States and localities to manage their own election procedures and, instead, imposing a one-size-fits-all regulatory regime direct from Washington, D.C. like H.R. 1 before it, this bill was produced without Republican input and, instead, reflects only the partisan motivations of the current majority. Madam Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the previous question, ``no'' on the rule, and ``no'' on the underlying measures. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois.

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, could I inquire, I am prepared to close whenever my friend is. If he has additional speakers, I will just reserve.

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by just submitting for the Record the views of the National Disability Rights Network, which actually came out against this legislation because they believe it will make it more difficult for people with physical impairments to actually get to the polls and vote. I know that is not the intention of my friend on the other side, but that is the effect of one-size-fits-all voting. National Disability Rights Network, June 25, 2019. Hon. Zoe Lofgren, Chairwoman, House Administration Committee, Washington, DC. Hon. Rodney Davis, Ranking Member, House Administration Committee, Washington,

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to make a quick point, and then I want to move to my friend from Illinois. Madam Speaker, I don't argue about constitutional power, but I argue about process. Look, I seriously doubt my friends have spent very much time talking to election board secretaries and election administration officials around the country. Had they done so, they would have heard, I am sure, uniformly that they don't want a one-size-fits-all made system from Washington, D.C. They don't want to throw away equipment that they think is better than what we are offering them or that they have already invested millions of dollars in. They are happy to work with us. They are happy to inform us and testify. That is not what is happening here. This is the idea: all wisdom is in this Chamber, evidently, because it is not going to get through the Senate, it is not going to get signed by the President. We haven't talked to the people that actually are the front-line people in defending us in this process, and that is the folks at the State and the local level. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Rodney Davis).

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I want to remind my friends that it took them weeks, if not longer, to even acknowledge there was a crisis at the border. As a matter of fact, they were accusing the President of manufacturing the crisis a few weeks ago. Now, fortunately, they have come around to the idea that hundreds of thousands of people arriving over a 3-month period of time is a crisis. Secondly, I want to remind them, they have still yet to act in the face of the crisis. They have had the ability to pass legislation. The President asked for it almost 60 days ago. We still haven't seen anything in terms of legislation reaching this floor. Madam Speaker, I also want to point out that, frankly, it shouldn't take this long to respond. We can disagree over a lot of things. And I have no doubt about the sincerity of my friends when it comes to being concerned about the well-being of these children; none whatsoever. But we know that part of this crisis is created because we haven't given the President the emergency funds he needs to quickly move people out of facilities where they were never designed to be, into influx facilities that we are trying to stand up, literally, right now. One of these is going to be in my district. We dealt with this, by the way, in 2014. We did it with President Obama; supported it; gave him the funds he needed; a Republican House, a Democratic Senate, and the President. He got that money in 24 days. One of those facilities was set up in my district. Again, we don't like using military bases in this way; don't approve of it; but we understand that President Obama faced an emergency situation, and we gave him the tools and the resources he needed to deal with that. That needs to happen now. Frankly, what we are seeing in the House is quite a contrast to the Senate, which has a bill in the Appropriations Committee that was reported out 30-1. It is bipartisan. It is a bill the President has expressed a willingness to sign. We ought to be working with that vehicle, if my friends can't get something to the floor to deal with this urgent crisis now. Madam Speaker, I would also, if I may, like to inform the Chair that if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to immediately bring up Congressman Davis' Election Security Assistance Act for consideration under an open rule. This bill provides targeted and crucially needed resources to State and local election administrators to help secure America's voting infrastructure. Unlike the majority's partisan bill that takes over all election operations and replaces local authority with a one-size-fits- all mandate from Washington, the Republican alternative provides needed resources without stepping on the toes of State and local election administrators. It provides grants to States to update aging and at-risk election infrastructure; provides security clearances to election officials to facilitate the sharing of information about threats with frontline officials; increases resources available to States and local governments; and provides for hands-on assistance, as needed. Madam Speaker, we all agree that our elections need to be protected, and we all agree that more resources and more assets are necessary to accomplish that goal. But rather than pushing a complicated mandate from Washington that wastes taxpayer dollars and eliminates the tradition of State and local control over the election operations, we can do better by providing resources for security improvements and reinforcements for local officials with the minimum additional regulation. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Rodney Davis), my good friend, the author of the legislation in question.

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, to quote my friend, ``give me a break.'' The last Republican Congress appropriated roughly $300 million for election security, point 1. Point 2, we have no evidence anybody hacked any election machines, as my friend, Mr. Davis pointed out in 2016 or 2018. If you want to respond to the Russians, you probably ought to respond to what they did, not to what they didn't do or didn't succeed in doing. I would actually argue this administration did a lot more than the last administration. You have got a larger military today, partly because of what the Russians did. You have a reinvigorated NATO today. You have a President who actually sent lethal aid to Ukraine today. You want to get the Russians' attention? That is the way you get it. When you lay down a red line in Syria, you enforce the red line. This administration has been a lot tougher on Russia than the last administration, which, by the way, knew this was going on, did almost nothing to alert anybody or to stop anybody; and now, are trying to blame it on the person that was actually involved in the election, our current President, for their lapse when they were actually in power in the executive branch. So this idea that nobody wants to defend our elections is not true. And, frankly, I will take some offense because I have never said that the Russians didn't matter, or that our elections weren't serious or weren't threatened. I used to be a State election board secretary. I used to sit on the Board of Directors for the election board secretaries around the country, and the oldest public body that there is, or the oldest association of public officials there is in this country; very bipartisan, by the way, extraordinarily well-run. They don't agree with this bill. I would just ask every Member to call their local Secretary of State or election administrator, whatever they have, and go through the bill and say, did you want to cede this much authority to the Congress of the United States; or do you think you do a pretty good job of running your own election? I know in my State, we do a very good job of running our elections, and that has been true under Democrats and true under Republicans. I think that is true around the country. The other thing is if you want to actually do something before the 2020 election, then whether you like it or not, you are going to have to do something that is bipartisan, because this will not get through the Senate and this will not become law, and that makes it a rather pointless exercise. Sometimes in the legislative process, you sit down, and in Mr. Davis, I will tell you, you have a willing partner and a person who has a reputation in this body that I think is exceptionally bipartisan and who is working, I think, in good faith on this very problem, and you work through the problem. But if it is going to be a partisan my-way-or-the-highway approach-- remember, this is coming under a closed rule, there is not even an amendment made in order here--then it is not likely to get out of this Chamber. So if you are serious about trying to protect the elections, you would. You may not get everything you want, but in divided government, you have to work together to get things done. That is the problem with almost every major initiative that our Democratic friends have brought to the floor since they have been in the majority. Sorry. The Constitution is pretty clear. The Senate gets to decide whether or not they are going to accept what we do over here or do something different. The President has a part in this process. We had to endure this when we first became the majority. We had a Republican House, we had a Democratic Senate, we had a Democratic President. I don't have any problem with my friends bringing their agenda to the floor. I applaud them for doing it. They ran on it. It is perfectly appropriate. A lot of times we bring that agenda to the floor knowing we can get it across this Chamber, but we are not going to probably get it all the way through the process unless we change it some. What we haven't seen yet is any evidence that the new majority has any ability to work with the current majority or the current President. And if that is what they want to do for 18 months, score political points as opposed to actually legislate something in a compromise manner, they are free to do that, too, but it is not going to work. If the aim here is to make our elections more secure, then I wouldn't bring a bill with a closed rule. I would work with the other side, knowing that their very concerns are probably going to be similar to the concerns expressed in the United States Senate and by the President of the United States. So, you know, that is an unsolicited piece of personal and political advice to my friends, but I think if they follow it, they will actually have some success legislatively and will actually get some things done. We are going to disagree about a lot of things. The American people will sort that out in rather short order, about 18 months, but we ought to try to get the things we can do today done. This is an area I think we could work together in if we approached it in a different manner. I would also hope we could do the same thing on the southern border, Madam Speaker. That is an impending emergency right now. We are going to run out of money right now. So let's get that at least taken care of while we sort out our differences in other areas. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I want to thank my good friend, the gentleman from Massachusetts, Chairman McGovern, for yielding me the customary 30 minutes. Madam Speaker, we are here today on two very different pieces of legislation. Last night at the Rules Committee, I noted that these unrelated bills have only one thing in common, and that is their place in the Democratic majority's partisan, going-nowhere agenda. Unfortunately, I believe today's rule is only going to compound that recurring problem of the Democrats, frankly, not even trying to work with Republicans to actually legislate in divided government. Our first bill today is H.R. 3351, the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act of 2020. This is the 10th of 12 appropriations bills to come to the floor. As we have worked through these bills, I have raised several concerns that are applicable to this bill as well. Like the previous appropriations bills this Congress, H.R. 3351 is marked to a high allocation figure that has no basis in reality. Remember, the House and Senate have not agreed to an overall budget for fiscal year 2020, which the Congressional Budget Act mandates be done by April 15. Without a budget agreement, the budget cap numbers contained in the Budget Control Act will automatically take effect, leading to an 11 percent cut in defense spending and a 9 percent cut in nondefense spending. Instead of working with Republicans in the Senate to reach a deal before marking and reporting funding bills, the majority has, instead, gone ahead and pushed through their own partisan appropriations bills that are marked to fake and unrealistic numbers. The 12 appropriations bills the majority has proposed have several flaws in common. They reflect the idea that any increase in defense spending must be matched by an even greater increase in nondefense spending, which simply isn't a realistic assessment of our national priorities. What is worse, these bills actually underfund defense and homeland security, coming in below the numbers that the President requested in order to ensure our military can adequately defend our Nation. The FSGG bill we are considering today contains an 8 percent increase over fiscal year 2019, which makes little sense when we are simultaneously underfunding our national security. Like the previous bills brought by my Democratic friends, the Financial Services appropriations bill also contains several partisan provisions that must be removed before a bipartisan, bicameral agreement can be reached on spending. The majority has removed longstanding pro-life protections, such as a rider that prohibits the District of Columbia from using government funds to provide for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or health of the mother. The majority has also cut out a longstanding provision that I originally sponsored several years ago barring government contractors from being forced to disclose political campaign contributions. Since I originally sponsored this provision several years ago, I find it surprising that the majority would eliminate this provision, which provides important protections for government contractors and prevents contracts from being awarded on the basis of contributions. Of course, there was an opportunity to work through and fix these problems through the amendment process. But instead of making things better, the majority has chosen, once again, to leave out minority voices. I want to reiterate a point I made the last time I was on the floor for a rule. During the last Congress, when Republicans were in the majority, our record shows that we allowed more amendments sponsored solely by Democrats than we did amendments sponsored solely by Republicans. The current majority has a much sorrier record. As of yesterday, of all amendments made in order this Congress, 67 percent were sponsored by Democrats, 19 percent by Republicans, and 13 percent were bipartisan. Today's rule is right in line with that record. Sixty-seven percent of the amendments made in order are sponsored by Democrats, 24 percent by Republicans, and 9 percent are bipartisan. Madam Speaker, this record of partisanship is a far cry from what the majority promised at the start of this Congress. There was an opportunity to move forward with fulfilling the majority's promises with today's rule. Instead, we see few Republican amendments and many Democratic amendments, resulting in a final product that will fail to achieve the bipartisan support needed to become law. The second bill included in this rule is H.R. 2722, which the majority is promoting as a bill that provides security for elections. The reality is that this bill, like its partisan predecessor H.R. 1 that passed the House earlier this Congress, amounts to nothing less than a complete Federal takeover of elections. Traditionally, elections are left to the States and local governments to conduct as they see fit. Localities can respond to local conditions; election officials can innovate; and elections can be operated in a way that best suits the unique needs of each community. H.R. 2722 turns all that on its head. The bill will force all elections to be conducted using paper ballots, even if the local officials prefer more advanced technology. It will require costly recounts with no apparent purpose. It will impose significant and wasteful spending on taxpayers. Instead of affirming States as the laboratories of democracy, when it comes to elections, H.R. 2722 will impose a one-size-fits-all regulatory regime directed from Washington on communities across the country. Madam Speaker, this state of affairs could and should have been avoided. Instead of pushing these partisan bills this week, the majority could have chosen to work with Republicans to craft bipartisan bills to address all of these problems. Even if that did not come to pass, the majority at the Rules Committee still could have worked with the minority to make more minority amendments in order and give all Members the opportunity to fix these flawed bills on the floor. That they did not is yet another indication of where the majority's priorities lie: with pushing partisan bills to score political points and avoiding the bipartisan work of actually making law. There is still a chance to change, Madam Speaker. In order to do so, the majority needs to decide whether they are here to score political points or if they are here to make law. Before I conclude, I would be remiss if I did not highlight what is missing in today's rule. We should have been considering three bills today, not two. The missing bill is the supplemental appropriations bill providing funding for the humanitarian crisis on the southern border. Each week, this crisis grows worse. Our facilities for holding new arrivals, particularly children and vulnerable unaccompanied minors, are already at the breaking point. Simply put, we need more resources, and we need them today. To be fair to the President, he has been asking Congress to do that since May 1. The failure to brin forward a supplemental appropriations bill for this purpose is a major failure of governance by the majority. All of us here, Republicans and Democrats alike, agree that we need to provide funding for this crisis. Time is wasting while we wait. Back in 2014, when President Obama asked us for $3.7 billion in supplemental resources for precisely the same purpose, the House acted to give him the resources he needed in 24 days. As of today, almost 2 months have gone by with the majority failing to act. Many of my friends on the other side rightfully express concern that unaccompanied minors backing up at border stations is not appropriate nor in the best interests of the children. I couldn't agree more. The Border Patrol couldn't agree more. By failing to bring forward a supplemental appropriations bill, the path the majority is taking us on leads only to this outcome: hurting the children I know we all want to help. Congress has given HHS the mandate to care for unaccompanied minors. Congress now needs to write the check so that HHS can do what Congress has mandated. I remind my friends across the aisle that Republicans are ready and willing to work with them to pass a bipartisan supplemental appropriations package that provides needed funding for housing, for the Department of Defense, and especially for children who find themselves in an unfathomable situation at the border. Madam Speaker, I urge opposition to the rule, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. COLE

Mr. COLE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), my good friend, and the most distinguished defender of life in this Chamber.

Mr. COLE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, the bill as reported out of the full Appropriations Committee contains a poison pill which my amendment seeks to remove. The rider of the underlying bill blocks the exercise of civil rights of all Americans. Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a rule which gives the Office for Civil Rights the tools it needs to investigate discrimination and enforce the laws as written. The new rule protects physicians, pharmacists, nurses, teachers, students, and faith-based charities, who do not wish to provide, participate in, pay for, provide coverage for, or refer to services such as abortion, sterilization, or assisted suicide. The Labor-HHS bill will never become law if this language remains in it. Mr. Chair, I ask my colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. COLE. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. COLE. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. David P. Roe).

Mr. COLE. Mr. Chair, I thank the distinguished ranking Republican member of the Appropriations Committee, my good friend, Ms. Granger, for yielding. I want to begin, Mr. Chair, on a positive note. I want to thank, particularly, my working partner, Rosa DeLauro, whom I have had the great opportunity to work with now for the fifth year. There are a lot of good things in this bill, a lot of things to be proud of. Frankly, we have worked together in the past and continued to work together in this bill. I am particularly pleased with the additional support for the National Institutes of Health and for the Centers for Disease Control. I very much support the focus on early childhood education, on first- generation college students through programs like TRIO and GEAR UP, frankly, through our ChalleNGe children, the IDEA program, and many other good provisions. However, there are certainly a number of other things in this bill that mean I won't be able to support it at this time. I was disappointed to see language inserted throughout the bill that ties the hands of the administration in many ways. The bill forces a return to the Obama-era policies on Title X family programs. The bill ties the hands of the administration by not allowing it to process waivers that protect deeply held religious beliefs of institutions that provide vital services funded in the bill. The bill micromanages the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, even going so far as to prescribe specific amounts of money to be used in advertising programs. I am also concerned about a number of limitations in this bill that are going to lead to a Presidential veto. While the bill does many good things, I remain concerned that it has been developed in a vacuum. As my good friend, the ranking member, said, these numbers are simply too high. They are not going to be accepted by a Republican Senate. They are not going to be signed by the President of the United States, and we run the risk of a Presidential veto. We need to come together, Mr. Chair, House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats, with the administration to hammer out a deal on top-line funding before we can move forward and actually move this bill into law. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the significant crisis facing us on our southern border. That has yet to be addressed in this bill, and a number of our speakers have made that point. The Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Chair, is at the breaking point. We literally will go broke this month taking care of unaccompanied children unless the majority works with the administration and their Republican colleagues to address this problem. I want to end by announcing that I will oppose the bill, but I look forward to working with my friends on the other side as we go through the process. I am convinced that under Chairwoman Lowey's leadership with Ranking Member Granger, we can arrive at a good solution for the country. This is a work in progress, and I think it is going to get better as it moves through the process.

Mr. COLE. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. COLE. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. COLE

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Gonzalez).

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Smucker).

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule immediately to bring up H.R. 3056 for consideration under an open rule. The bill provides $4.5 billion of funding to address the immediate humanitarian crisis on the southern border. This is a crisis of significant proportions, Mr. Speaker. Our facilities for holding new arrivals, particularly children and the vulnerable unaccompanied minors, are already at the breaking point. Simply put, we need more resources, and we need them today. This is not the first time we have needed to provide supplemental appropriations for this purpose. Back in 2014, then-President Barack Obama asked us for $3.7 billion in supplemental resources for precisely the same purpose. He got it. At the time, we had 60,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived in 2014. We face a similar and, frankly, larger humanitarian crisis today. President Obama was right to request supplemental funds to deal with the crisis then. We would be right to appropriate supplemental funds to address that similar crisis now. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Rogers).

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin), for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I hadn't had this in the opening, but I want to disagree with my friend right off the top. The President of the United States does not work for the Congress of the United States. He works for the American people, and he heads up a branch of government that is a coequal branch of government. So, on that, we will have a long discussion. Mr. Speaker, it has been a very eventful week in the Rules Committee, and it is only Tuesday. Last night, the committee met and reported out a rule that covers two drastically different measures. H.R. 2740 is an appropriations package that covered first 5 and then 4 of the 12 appropriations bills for fiscal year 2020. We also considered H. Res. 430, a resolution that gives authority to the Office of the General Counsel of the House of Representatives to seek to enforce certain subpoenas for documents through litigation. Shortly after we finish here, the committee will again convene to consider the remainder of the appropriations package, which will be on the floor as part of a separate rule tomorrow. Meanwhile, our Members will attempt the miracle of being in two places at once as we continue to debate H. Res. 430, which falls into our original jurisdiction here on the floor. Mr. Speaker, H. Res. 430 comes from a dispute over documents relating to the special counsel's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. The dispute also stems from the inherent oversight authority of Congress and our ability to perform oversight functions over the executive branch. It falls into the fuzzy boundaries between the branches of governments as to when and how we may compel the executive branch to turn over documents to the legislative branch. I lay out that framework because there is an important point here that is being lost. The Democratic majority clearly wants to make this dispute entirely about this President, this Attorney General, this White House counsel, this investigation, this subpoena of documents. The Democrats want to focus attention there because they think it helps them politically to do so. But this dispute really shouldn't be about just that. It should, rather, be about the difficult and thorny questions that emerge in a system like ours with three branches of government with checks and balances. In a sense, what the majority is seeking to do here today is completely unprecedented, both in its intent and in its execution. Consider the only other times the House has filed a lawsuit to seek to enforce a subpoena for documents. It has happened twice before, Mr. Speaker, once in 2007, to seek documents from former White House Counsel Harriet Miers, and again in 2012, to seek documents from then- Attorney General Eric Holder as a result of the congressional investigation into the Fast and Furious scandal. In both of these cases, the House had already voted to hold both Miers and Holder in contempt of Congress before filing suit, which has not yet happened in this case. In the Miers case, 138 days elapsed from the first document request to the Judiciary Committee voting to hold her in contempt. In the Holder case, it was significantly longer, in that 464 days elapsed from the first document request to the committee voting to hold him in contempt. That was well over a year. Here, the majority is forcing us to rush forward at a much faster pace. Just 44 days elapsed from the date of the first document request to the Attorney General until the Judiciary Committee voted to hold him in contempt. James Holzhauer has been champion of ``Jeopardy!'' for longer than that. I don't understand the majority's haste here. Without exhausting all other options--continuing negotiation, discussion, compromise, and turning to a vote on contempt as the last resort--the majority is, instead, pushing this forward into litigation with the executive branch. In doing so, they may well be placing the House in a position that causes significant long-term damage to the institution. When this matter goes before the courts, it will do so as a case of first impression and under an untested legal theory. In both the Miers and Holder cases, the House previously voted to hold those two individuals in contempt of Congress. Nothing like that has been done here. Using untested tactics like this could set a dangerous precedent that harms us all, Republicans and Democrats, in the long run. Finally, I would also note that it is not clear what this resolution will ultimately accomplish. Since the House has not yet exercised all the tools in its tool kit, and since it is not clear that the negotiations with the Justice Department and the White House over the documents at issue are at an end, this whole thing may be nothing more than sound and fury. Indeed, given how quickly the majority is rushing into things, it seems unlikely that the only course of action left in the House is to file a lawsuit. I strongly urge the majority to continue working with the Justice Department and the White House to find a resolution to these issues without resorting to knee-jerk lawsuits that may ultimately damage the House as an institution. Today, we are also beginning consideration of H.R. 2740, an appropriations package covering 5 of 12 appropriations bills: Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education; Legislative Branch; Defense; State and Foreign Operations; and Energy and Water Development. These five bills cover over 70 percent of our total discretionary spending for fiscal year 2020. To be precise, Mr. Speaker, we were to do five bills. At the last moment, the majority pulled the Legislative Branch appropriations bill. I will let them explain why at their leisure. As a longtime member of the Appropriations Committee, I am pleased that we are beginning to move the appropriations bills to the floor. Unfortunately, the bills before us have numerous flaws, most notably that they are marked to allocation levels that aren't realistic. As we move forward through the appropriations process, I think we need to be clear about the challenges we face this year. At the end of September, fiscal year 2019 expires, and sequestration cuts contained in the Budget Control Act of 2011 will automatically take effect for fiscal year 2020. In order to prevent that, we need to come to a bipartisan, bicameral budget deal that the House, the Senate, and the President can all agree on. If we don't, then it doesn't really matter what fake number the House marks to. Sequestration will hit, and our defense budget will automatically be slashed by 11 percent and our nondefense budget by 9 percent below the allocations of 2019. The spending levels in these appropriations bills are not just ambitious; they are unrealistic. Not only are the funding levels for many of these bills too high, so high that the Senate and the President will never agree to them, but the allocations the Appropriations Committee used reflect the misguided notion that any increase in defense spending must be matched by an increase in nondefense spending that is more than twice as high. That is simply not a realistic assessment of our national priorities or the fiscal limitations imposed on us by our rising national debt. The defense provision of this bill, for example, comes in at $8 billion less than the President told us was needed to adequately fund the military, maintain readiness, and be prepared to confront international threats. After years of severe underfunding of our Armed Forces and at a time when threats are emerging everywhere around the globe, spending less than the administration asks for on defense in order to push more money into domestic programs is not a wise course of action. I am disappointed that the majority chose to strip out pro-life provisions that have been carried in appropriations bills for years. Instead, they added controversial pro-abortion riders that virtually guarantee no Republican support whatsoever for this package. As the former chair and current ranking member of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, I am familiar with the need for compromise on that particular piece of legislation. But by pushing forward with blatantly partisan riders like these, the majority is guaranteeing the outcome of these bills: dead on arrival in a Republican-led Senate and no chance of getting a Republican President's signature. In the coming months, I hope we work through these problems, as we did last year, frankly. If the majority intends to move forward with unrealistic spending levels and insists on maintaining partisan riders, then we are simply guaranteeing a failed appropriations process. Make no mistake, Mr. Speaker, our failure has consequences. A best- case scenario is a yearlong continuing resolution that funds the government at the exact same level as the current year. That is the best scenario if we fail. The worst-case scenario is another government shutdown or sequestration that automatically cuts all government funding levels. Neither of these is a good outcome for the House as an institution, for the Federal Government, or more importantly, for the American people. Mr. Speaker, although I cannot support either bill before us today, I am hopeful that, eventually, we will reach a bipartisan, bicameral compromise on spending that the vast majority of Members in this House can support. That requires realistic funding levels and elimination of partisan riders from this package. The spending package before us today may be a worthy starting point, but it will take hard work and compromise to move the final bill that can become law. Mr. Speaker, I urge opposition to the rule, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from the great State of Oklahoma (Mr. Kevin Hern).