Barney Frank

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, that timetable with a rollcall on the Goss amendment would, of course, preempt any other amendments. I would not be able to accept something that would preempt any other chance for any other amendments.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, that will not be agreeable, but it is the best we can get. We will still be at risk. I hope, if Members will cooperate, we can get to the amendment of the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Watt]. Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Us, too, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I was at a meeting and I did not get the welcome news bulletin we just got that apparently the Republican whip operation was not able to get 20 percent. I do not know if Members fully understood what we just heard but apparently the effort to persuade people who voted to go from 10 to 30, they would then vote to go from 10 to 20 was not successful, so apparently we have some concession.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I yield to the gentleman from Idaho.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I yield to the gentleman from California, the author of the amendment.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This is an amendment that is about a subspecies of land. This is the planting of shade trees to give cover to Members who switched their vote. Since everything has already been arranged and since under this restrictive 12-hour rule, if I debate this at any length my friend from North Carolina will be preempted from offering his amendment, I would simply say that I think this is just to cover Members who voted the other way on the last one since all the votes have already been accounted for.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time, in the hopes that we will be able to protect the right of the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Watt] to offer his amendment.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I thank the gentleman's interest in giving people that opportunity. I am touched by it. He is a soul of generosity. But I do know that last night when we were ready to go to vote at 9:35 on this and leave time for other amendments so we would chew up the whole 12 hours, the Republican leadership said no because they did not have the votes lined up yet. So I have not said there was pressure. It does seem to me, though, there was some very intense persuasion going on.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I thank the gentleman. Fortunate are those who can vote their conscience and their constituency at the same time. That is a great position to be in. Let me say with regard to this whole 10 and 20 percent, one thing is very important to note. All of the horror stories we have heard, and many of them appear to be clear cases of abuse and misapplication of the statute, would be covered by the 20 percent, and the effort to restrict the number, the effort to defeat 30 percent and the effort to water down the 20 percent makes it very clear. This legislation is not aimed at alleviating those who have been the victims of horror stories, it is aimed at restricting the very operation of these laws as Congress intended them to operate, because if you were worried about the people who were cited in the very poignant examples we have heard, all of them would have been covered by the amendment that the gentleman from California has offered, because they were 100 percent disabilities of their property. Those were people who were told they could not live in their homes; those were people told they could not do anything at all. So the fight over the marginal number makes it very clear that this bill is aimed not at the occasional excess, but at the very heart of it today to correct the operations of these activities, and therefore, it is a very important amendment. We get, by the way, as to 10 and 20, into the question of what is a de minimis level. Ten percent would mean that virtually every action taken by these entities would be litigated and administered. I preferred 30 percent, but I think since that lost, the gentleman from California's amendment is a significant improvement. So take the two together, the insistence on a 10-percent threshold or 20 percent with the land so narrowly defined that it becomes far less than 10 percent to the whole property and what you see is this is not an effort, as I said, to prevent abuse of the statute. That is being done elsewhere when we rewrite the statute and deal with regulatory reform. This is an effort to severely hinder the operation of these statutes as written to say that there will be much less wetland regulation, that there will be much less environmental endangered species regulations because virtually every action that would be taken by these agencies would trigger such a thing.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I yield further to the gentleman from California.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, since I yielded a good part of my time, I would like to make this one further point. Under the gentleman's amendment, one of the programs that will survive for compensation is if you have got property and you fill in a wetland or do something else that might be contrary to general conservation policies today, you lose your right to subsidy under the Agricultural Subsidy Program. What the gentleman from Louisiana's amendment would do would be to restore that right. If, in fact, you have a piece of property that is ruled a wetland or otherwise, the Agriculture Department and others say should not be worked and you change the land and then plant on it, the gentleman from Louisiana says you can be eligible for a subsidy. So we are not only talking about taking away the value, we are talking about the owner taking conscious action which enhances the value of the land in the nature of a Government subsidy. Telling people they ought to be able to go and make these changes so they are eligible for agriculture subsidies seems to me a mistake. The amendment in 1985 said they could not do that, the amendment passed under Ronald Reagan and the Republican Senate, as well as a Democratic House. I think that is a mistake.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I want to express my support for this amendment. With regard to the previous speaker, I want to express my skepticism that a staff member of a Member on the minority side somehow captured the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Porter], the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Ehlers], and other Republicans and turned them to his or her will. This amendment was drafted by the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Porter] and his colleagues long before my colleague from California got involved. But let us get back to the merits. First, I want to talk briefly about the procedures. We do not know a great unanswered. There have been a great deal of uncertainties. The chairman of the subcommittee has said we will have to get back to see if we can work that out to the gentleman from Mississippi. The problem is this bill has undergone none of the normal scrutiny of the legislative process. We had a hearing on the appropriate language, the relevant language, in the contract. That was a bumper sticker on a page. It had so little content it was an embarrassment even to them. The chairman of the full committee, the gentleman from Illinois, tried to remedy that situation, so when we had the committee markup, there was no subcommittee markup, when we had a committee markup, he had a very different bill. It looked a little bit like the Tauzin bill, but still there were a lot of differences. That bill had a life of about an hour. It disappeared even before some of the species that our friend from Maryland has lamented. Because back came something that was close to the original, and that went through the committee on a voice vote. Then when they realized that even by their standards that was too extreme to pass, they decided they had better make some kind of arrangement with the gentleman from Louisiana. So we got a fourth version of it, and the amalgam of the Canady substitute and the Tauzin amendment has never before been subjected to any legislative process. We are dealing with an extraordinarily complicated subject for the first time on the floor of the House this year without hearing and without any markup from the committee to which it was referred. Now, we have the second issue, and that is the unwillingness of the sponsors to discuss what this bill will really do, because what they have talked about are those examples when the regulatory process itself may have gone astray, and things go astray, Members of Congress, and legislative processes and all kinds of things go astray. They have talked about what they call the horror stories, how this misapplication and that misapplication was involved. But this bill, absent the amendment that we are now discussing, does not correct mistakes in the regulatory process. It applies, with its full force and effect, to those instances when the regulatory process is working perfectly and exactly as it was supposed to. This is a bill that deals with those instances when the Wetlands Act is being imposed to protect wetlands, because they have an important environmental purpose. Everyone acknowledges that wetlands have an important environmental purpose. They affect drinking water, a whole lot of things. This bill deals with those instances, a great majority of instances, when the system is working exactly as it should. It deals with the Endangered Species Act when it is working exactly as it should. Why do they talk about the exceptions? Because the real purpose is to undo the basic Wetlands and Endangered Species Acts, and if they want to do that, they should do that in those committees. They said, ``Well, in the past, we did not have control of those committees.'' But they do now. Those committees now have majorities amenable to them, so they ought to be brought up in those committees. Instead, you have got this now you see it, now you don't process. In fact, what they did in the Committee on the Judiciary was pull the old hidden bill trick, because the bill that finally came to the floor had very little relationship to the bills we had hearings on and the bills we debated, and, again, what they are doing is attacking the Wetlands Act and attacking the Endangered Species Act collaterally, not by changing the substance, but by making them impossible to enforce. Because, again, I want to be very clear about this, this is not a bill that says where the Corps of Engineers, where the EPA, where the Interior Department has misapplied the law they have to pay, where they have exaggerated, where they have had bad science, they have to pay. This is a law that says that when any of the Federal agencies charged with administering these acts carries out the act exactly as it was meant to be carried out to protect wetlands, to protect endangered species, to do exactly those environmental things which we said we wanted done, they will have to pay and engage in this very lengthy process. That is why, both for procedural and substantive reasons, it is a grave error to try to rush this bill through here. It is one more example of undue haste on a complex subject, the result of which will be the kind of legislation we now have. This amendment would slow it down. The amendment, for a bill from the Committee on the Judiciary dealing with process, is the appropriate amendment. If Members feel that, as part of the Wetlands Act and as part of the Endangered Species Act, they have been overadministered, then deal with them here. Do not do it by stealth in this bill.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I am rising in opposition to the amendment, but I want to engage the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Tauzin] in a discussion because I think he overstated what the bill will look like if his amendment is adopted, and understated its effect. Hr said, ``I believe that if something is prohibited by State law, it would not be compensable.'' But that is what the underlying bill says. His amendment would restrict that. His amendment would say that if it is restricted as a nuisance under State law, it would not be compensable but anything else restricted by State law would be compensable.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. It is taken into account. It does not trigger it, but it, in fact, will be taken into account, and land that gets an agriculture subsidy is worth more.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. No. I think we have made that clear enough. The gentleman has acknowledged that. He can discuss later and defend it later. But I think the point is clear. The other problem I have with the amendment is this: In 1985, Congress said----

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, those who are arguing that the current form of the balanced budget amendment puts Social Security at risk are undeniably correct. The amendment says that in the year 2002 it will be mandatory that any surplus from Social Security be used to reduce the overall deficit elsewhere in the Federal Government for the purposes of achieving balance. What this means is that there will be a constitutional imperative to the Congress to cut Social Security expenditures if they need to do that to make up the deficit elsewhere. That is not an academic threat. The Speaker of this House has demanded that the Bureau of Labor Statistics recalculate the Consumer Price Index. Reducing the Consumer Price Index has as its major impact saying that older people get less of a cost-of-living increase under Social Security. So when the Republicans push a form of the balanced budget amendment that allows, indeed, compels, any surplus in Social Security to be used to offset a deficit elsewhere and simultaneously argues that we should cut the Consumer Price Index, which has as its major fiscal impact reducing the cost-of-living increase, we see why Senators are right to oppose this amendment in its current form.