Norm Dicks

Mr. DICKS

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would continue to yield, I would hope that the gentleman from California would talk to his leadership, too, because his leadership has got to play a role here in giving some guidance to senior Members, because they are in charge of the House, because they are the majority party.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, I think the chairman is operating in totally good faith, but the way to move forward is to support the Military Construction appropriations bill, which came to this floor on a bipartisan basis. The subcommittee wanted this problem solved. We solved it in the full committee with the help of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg) and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards). This thing was worked out. The reason we are doing this is because of this Congressional Budget Office rule, and OMB, the administration, the Defense Department all want us to do this. Why can we not figure out a way to do this today? Why do we have to wait for months when we could get this thing done? He makes all kinds of excuses, but we might be able to put this into another bill and maybe it will go into the CR if it passes the House.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. DICKS

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, I want to compliment the gentleman on his statement; and when he is right, he is really right. I thank him.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, we did not have much time on the rule to discuss this issue on the cap on family housing, and I want to first of all congratulate the chairman (Mr. Knollenberg) and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards) for working together in a very bipartisan basis in our committee. The chairman could not have done more to help bring this provision to the floor of the House. We all regret, and I think it was a mistake in judgment for the Committee on Rules, to make a decision to not protect this provision, and this provision which raised by $500 million the cap on family housing was sought by the administration. Each of the services testified before our subcommittee. The Secretary of Defense and his people supported it. The White House supported it. OMB supported it. The chairman of the Committee on Armed Services supported it. Of course our distinguished chairman of the Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction and the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations also supported it. And we are going to make a decision based on an arcane rule coming out of CBO that is in conflict with OMB. Now, my view in this situation, if I were in the majority party and the administration wanted this done, I would be trying to find a way to make it happen; and this is a big problem, because there are, I think, about a dozen projects. Here are the projects that will not go forward this year if the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) has his way: Fort Drum, New York; Dover Air Force Base, Delaware; Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina; Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico; Fort Monmouth/Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey; Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania; Fort Bliss, Texas; White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; Altus Air Force Base, Oklahoma; Eglin/ Hurlburt Air Force Base, Florida; Lackland Air Force Base, Texas; Langley Air Force Base, Virginia; Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas; Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma; McGuire Air Force Base/Fort Dix, New Jersey; MCAGCC Twentynine Palms, California; MCSA Kansas City, Missouri; Camp Lejeune/MCB Cherry Point, North Carolina; Stewart Army Subpost. Those projects will all be delayed because of this decision; and as has been suggested, we are in a time of war. We are in a war on terrorism, a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan. We have our troops deployed all over the world. The one thing the people who are deploying say and their spouses say is one thing we really would like to see an improvement in, in the services, is military housing; and we have worked at Fort Lewis. I have a major project out there that is going forward. It is one of the greatest successes. We can get more housing, new housing and more restored housing faster under this public-private sector project; and usually the majority party is thrilled about public-private projects. In this case, this decision will adversely affect the quality of life of men and women serving in the military and their families, and this is over an arcane budget rule. To me, the insistence on striking this out is one of the worst mistakes I think we have made around here in a long time. One thing I have always been proud of, this House has always been able to rise above partisan or short-term considerations and work towards a bipartisan cooperation on defense. Let us not ruin that today.

Mr. DICKS

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, this is a disgrace. I have served on the Subcommittee on Defense of the Committee on Appropriations for 26 years, the Subcommittee on Military Construction for 18 years. The administration, the Department of Defense, the House Committee on Armed Services, the House Committee on Appropriations and the Subcommittee on Military Construction all support raising this provision. The Committee on the Budget is coming in here and prevailed on the House leadership. Now, I have heard a lot of rhetoric in this Presidential Campaign about certain votes in the other body where people did not vote for a certain supplemental appropriation for our troops. I want to say it very clearly. The American people are going to judge the majority party here today. If they go out here and vote for this rule that allows this provision to be stricken, they are voting against the men and women in the military of our country. It is simply that clear. I have always believed this House would always rise up in a bipartisan way and get the job done, when it counted, for our men and women in the field. This will be one of the few times in my 28 years in this House where that does not happen because of the Committee on the Budget and the CBO. OMB supports this. DOD supports it. The President, the Secretary of Defense, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young). Come on. Let us support this bill. Let us override the Committee on the Budget.

Mr. DICKS

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, I want to take very strong exception to what the chairman of this committee, who I consider to be a personal friend, said to attack the Democrats in this House. And I was the ranking member of this committee for 4 years from 1994 to 1998. And we had bipartisan support for intelligence. And I think this is wrong to try to go back now and say after the Cold War was over, and there were some efforts, and it was first by the Bush administration, to reduce the money for defense. I mean, Dick Cheney was one of the biggest budget hawks and cutters on defense. He cut the B-2, he tried to get rid of the V-22, the F-15, F-16. One can go right down the list. Colin Powell was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They had what they called the base force which was one-third less than the size of the existing force. And as part of this downsizing, the intelligence community was cut by 10 percent. That was the policy of the first Bush administration that was inherited by the Clinton administration. And I must say during the years that I was on the committee under Dan Glickman as chairman and Larry Combest and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss) as chairman, we were able to work on a bipartisan basis. And we supported intelligence. Now, we did not throw money at it. We tried to make sure that we invested wisely. We had to modernize all of our national technical means. But this was done on a bipartisan basis. I am very sorry to see this breakdown this year, for the first time to see the partisanship enter into this. Because I do not think it is in the best interest of our Congress or our national security, and especially at a time when we are in a war-time situation. But to attack the Democrats, I say to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss), I think is uncalled for.

Mr. DICKS. I yield to the gentlewoman from California.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, I have to use the time. Again, I just want to say that during the time I was on the committee, we tried to do the best we could for the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the intelligence community, we supported it. I am very proud of the record that was achieved, was done on a bipartisan basis. I hope we can go back to that. I know it is painful when your person is in the White House and you have to defend the administration and you want to fend off all these investigations, I can just tell my colleague this, we investigated everything under the sun when Bill Clinton was at the White House because the majority party insisted on it. Now, when it is their person as President of the United States, they are not so excited about investigations and getting all this information. But I think it is important for the American people that we do get the information, that we do find out about these detainees, and that we do get in information in a timely way. If they are going to stonewall, then we will have to use other tactics like a resolution of inquiry to get the information from the Department of Defense.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, first of all, I want to rise in support of the Reyes amendment. I wanted to go back to the Rogers amendment just for a second, and I wanted to compliment the ranking member for opposing it. Mr. Chairman, I served on the committee from 1990 to 1998. There was an understanding at the end of the Cold War, this was during the first Bush administration, that we were going to cut Defense by about 30 percent, 33 percent, but intelligence would be protected and held at about a 10 percent cut. It was believed that everything within this Defense budget should be reduced at that point in time. So this was the policy laid down by Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. This created the base for us, and when the new administration came into office in 1993, Jim Woolsey was the head of the CIA, and he felt that they had to make some contribution. But we protected Intelligence. We protected it at the time. So the gentleman's information, the gentleman from Michigan's information, here is inaccurate; and I think it is too bad, really, that this is in these findings, because we all want to support the intelligence community tonight. But I could not support these findings. I could not ask one single Member of the Democratic Party to support these findings, because they are inaccurate. They are not correct, and they are distorted. Also, I thought we had a rule around here that we are not supposed to disclose intelligence information. I guess percentages do not count, but saying that the budget was cut a certain percentage, I think, is a mistake, and to acknowledge that publicly is a mistake. So I just wanted to stand up here tonight and say this: the Reyes amendment is about not getting to the bottom of this. I remember when my good friend, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss), and I were on the committee together. We had every investigation imaginable into the Clinton administration. One could not think up something that we did not investigate. We went along with that, because we felt that doing the investigations was the right thing. Now, on this one, guys, if we do not get to the bottom of this Guantanamo Bay and Iraqi prison thing, and if we do not insist that we get the information, I will be up here with a resolution of inquiry to demand that these Departments disclose this information.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, I offer a preferential motion.

Mr. DICKS. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, I want to take back my time. The gentleman has time on his own now, and he can use his own time.

Mr. DICKS

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, I would just point out one other thing to my distinguished chairman. I had no idea that this amendment would be offered on the floor; but once it was, I felt compelled to speak on behalf of it.

Mr. DICKS. Yes, I am.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I just mention this to my friend from Pennsylvania, that the Steel Workers Union of America is strongly in favor of this legislation. They want to see workers protected.

Mr. DICKS. And I appreciate the gentleman's willingness to discuss this issue. I know of his concern for government workers, because he has many in his own district; and I know that he will treat them as fairly as he has always treated me.

Mr. DICKS. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, we did have a proposal in our written document that went to the chairman that laid out a proposal, a different approach to this; and it would have just protected the public shipyards, both on the east coast, the west coast, and Hawaii.

Mr. DICKS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the Inslee-Van Hollen amendment. Last year, Congress gave the Department of Defense the authority to design a new civilian personnel system for its employees as part of the defense authorization bill. I opposed that part of the bill because it included a blanket waiver for the new system from all of the worker protections which Congress has wisely enacted through the years. Unfortunately, the House was denied a chance to vote directly on these changes in 2004, I must assume because of fear about how the vote would turn out. Now the Department of Defense is designing the new system, and the initial proposal published by the Department this spring, as mentioned by others, has confirmed every fear voiced by members of the House, such as myself and the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Van Hollen) about the new system. The initial proposal produced by the Department would have trampled worker rights in a wanton and deliberate fashion. More recently, Navy Secretary Gordon England has been assigned to work this issue for DOD, and he has pledged to work with DOD unions and employee organizations to design a fairer system. I am strongly encouraged by his involvement, but I also believe that DOD must design a new system which is consistent with strong worker protections. This guarantee is all that the Inslee-Van Hollen amendment would add to the bill before us today. Furthermore, there is an important monetary reason for supporting this amendment which is appropriate on the bill which deals with the defense budget. DOD has proposed creating within the Department of Defense two massive new bureaucracies which would duplicate the work of the existing Federal labor relations authority and the Merit System Protection Board. I believe that it would be irresponsible in the extreme for this committee to divert funding from badly needed warfighting priorities just so that the Department of Defense can duplicate the functions of independent government agencies under the control of the Secretary of Defense. This harms national security at the same time that it undermines worker rights. For all these reasons, Mr. Chairman, I ask that my colleagues support the Inslee-Van Hollen amendment and put the new personnel system at DOD back on the right track.

Mr. DICKS. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. DICKS. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland, the distinguished Democratic whip.

Mr. DICKS

Mr. DICKS. Madam Chairman, has the gentleman supported the reintroduction of the wolf as the predator in Montana?

Mr. DICKS. Madam Chairman, will the gentleman yield?