Jeff Flake

Mr. FLAKE

Mr. FLAKE. May I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. FLAKE. It was said again that I'm just trying to delay this process. If I were trying to delay this process, I could stand up here with a privileged resolution and read every one of the amendments that I wasn't allowed into the Record. It would take hours to do that. I'm not trying to delay this process unnecessarily. This isn't a dilatory tactic. It's just about the only way we can stand and actually register objection to this closed process. I suppose I could, and this would be chilling reading, read the transcript of yesterday's court trial of an individual who, I believe, is pleading guilty in some fashion, a contractor who received earmarks and passed them on to other contractors who weren't doing any work at all. That was under a previous Defense bill that wasn't vetted, as it should have been, that came to the floor probably last year under a closed process; no amendments could have been offered. And so here we have investigations, particularly with the PMA scandal, swirling around this institution because we aren't doing our work. We aren't vetting these bills. I wish that the Appropriations Committee would, but they're not. And then when you come to the floor and say, we'd like to challenge a few of these earmarks, you say, you can challenge eight of them; 8 of the more than 550 no-bid contracts to private companies. You can only question eight of them. That's all we have time for because we have to pass this bill today for some reason. The fiscal year doesn't run out until the end of September. This is not a bill that has to be passed today or tomorrow. We can spend the time that we need, or we should have taken time earlier this year instead of doing suspension bills or last Friday, instead of passing a wild horse welfare act or whatever we did. The appropriations bills are the most important work this Congress does. And to say that we have to move through them quickly so nobody sees what we're doing, so nobody sees that we're doing no-bid contracts for private companies is simply wrong. That is the abuse of power in this institution, not bringing 553 amendments to the floor. With that, I urge opposition to the rule and yield back my time.

Mr. FLAKE

Mr. FLAKE. Mr. Speaker, some things just don't add up. We're told that the Democrats' version of health care reform will cost less in the long run. Haven't we heard this before? When Medicare was instituted more than 30 years ago, for the first 25 years we were told that it would cost this amount. Instead, it costs nine times that much and that holds true for just about every government program that we institute. There are multiple, multiple times that it costs more and more and more than we ever thought it would. How do you control costs when you have no money to spend, when you have to borrow money? You control costs by rationing. Markets control costs with competition, a ration by competition. But governments control costs by rationing. And so what will happen here inevitably is that the services that you are now used to receiving, the medical services will be severely circumscribed. Let's be honest about this reform, at least, and tell people what they're going to get.

Mr. FLAKE

Mr. FLAKE. Madam Speaker, later today, the Rules Committee will be promulgating a rule for the Defense appropriation bill that I believe we'll consider tomorrow. This is, in my view, quite remarkable that we will be considering the Defense bill that spends hundreds of billions of dollars, we will be spending less than a day debating that legislation. What is remarkable about it as well is that there are 1,087 earmarks in the bill, more than 1,000 earmarks in the Defense bill that was considered by the full Appropriations Committee for a total of 18 minutes, not 18 minutes per earmark or per section of the bill or anything else, but the full Appropriations Committee considered that bill for 18 minutes, passed, done, markup finished, and now we've got that bill on the floor tomorrow. And unfortunately, as is the case or as has been the case with the rest of the appropriation bills this season, it will come to the floor under a structured or closed rule where the Rules Committee, the majority party, will determine which amendments the minority party and members of the majority party get to offer. Breaking from tradition that has held for decades and decades and perhaps centuries in this institution where appropriation bills have come to the floor under an open rule, this will come to the floor under a rule that only allows amendments to be offered that the majority party wants to see, not those that the minority party necessarily wants to offer. There are 548, at our count, earmarks in this bill that will go to private companies. These will be no-bid contracts for private companies. The majority party will say, well, we're inserting language saying that these earmarks have to be bid out. The purpose of an earmark is to ensure that that contract is not bid out. Otherwise, why earmark it? Why not just let the Defense Department decide where to spend its money? So these are earmarks. These are no-bid contracts. They're going to private companies. In many cases, those private companies will turn around, and the executives from those companies will make sizeable campaign contributions to the Members who secured the earmarks. That has been the pattern in this place for years, not just with the majority party in power but when the minority power was in power as well. It's simply gotten worse over time. Our Ethics Committee forces Members--and it's a good thing--to sign a certification letter saying that they have no financial stake in the earmark that they are securing, that a family member doesn't work for the firm receiving it, for example. But there's also guidance issued from the Ethics Committee that says that campaign contributions do not necessarily constitute financial interest. And so Members of this body are given a green light to basically earmark for campaign dollars. It's the so-called circular fund-raising that has become the norm around here. And if this wasn't bad enough, there are investigations swirling outside of this body. Members' offices have been subpoenaed. Some people on the outside have already pled guilty and are working with authorities involving earmarks and campaign contributions. There are allegations of straw men contributions that have been set up where individuals reimburse for contributions they make to Members who secure earmarks. There are all these investigations swirling outside. Yet we're moving through this appropriation process as if nothing were wrong, and we'll consider a bill in one day and limit the number of amendments that Members can bring forward. Now, this isn't the perfect way to scrutinize or to vet a bill, I recognize, on the House floor. But it's all we've got when the full committee Appropriations Committee takes a full 18 minutes to approve a bill that spends hundreds of millions of dollars and contains over 1,000 earmarks, 548 of which are no-bid contracts to private companies. We do that all in a day and then tell Members, oh, but we're only going to allow the amendments that we want to see, not necessarily the ones that you want to offer. In this legislation that we will consider tomorrow, there's an earmark going to a company called ProLogic, and it is reported that this company is under investigation by the FBI. The status of the investigation is unknown. Reports are simply out there that there are investigations. This company, the executives and lobbyists and those associated with it, have contributed more than $400,000 to congressional campaign committees. Yet we're still allowing this bill to go forward. Let's have a new rule for the bill.

Mr. FLAKE

Mr. FLAKE. I reclaim my time. There was another one. I asked unanimous consent to swap one of my amendments for the D.C. voucher amendment in D.C. Again, it fell within the time constraints.

Mr. FLAKE. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to clarify something that was said earlier. The gentleman from the Rules Committee mentioned or suggested that I had tied up the Leg Counsel office by offering 540 amendments for the no- bid contract in the defense bill for next week. In truth, we went to the Leg Counsel office because we were concerned about that, and they worked with us so that we could draft all of those amendments and so that they didn't have to do any of it. We didn't consume any of their time. If the gentleman has other information, I would ask him, please, to say so, but I think to suggest that we're doing that is, one, unfair to Leg Counsel. They work hard over there, and they do a great job. Secondly, it's unfair to my staff, who has worked a long time, late into the night, to do that.

Mr. FLAKE. May I inquire as to the time remaining?

Mr. FLAKE. I thank the gentleman. If I was looking to waste time and to delay, I would call a vote on this. That would take this body an extra half-hour or so. I am not going to do so. I know I'm going to lose this. But somebody at some point has to stand up and say, We're not potted plants over here. We're in the minority, yes. But we do have some rights, we think. The gentleman said that these amendments that I'll be offering to the Defense bill today are spurious. Last year I would have loved to have been able to offer some of these amendments, but I didn't have any ability at all. Not one amendment was offered to earmarks in the Defense bill. Why? Because it was a closed rule completely. It came in in mini-bus form, and no amendments at all were offered. That's happened, to some extent, over a couple of years. And what has happened during that time? Earmarks have been awarded, no-bid contracts to private companies, that are now being investigated because money went out; and individuals have already pled guilty to taking that earmarked money and spreading it around to some companies that did no work, none. They've already pled guilty for it. Again, we're bringing to the floor next week a Defense bill as if nothing's wrong, nothing's happening, no investigations are occurring. We're still going to award no-bid contracts to private companies. And yeah, we might hide some language or put some language in the bill that says, Well, these things are really going to be bid out. But the Defense Department, if you ask them today, Do you bid these things out? They say, Yes, we're required to. Except when we don't, when we issue what's called a J&A, and we decide, Well, we're really not going to bid that one out because it was asked for by Congress. That is just unbelievable to me that we are accused of being spurious when we attempt to bring earmark amendments to the floor to vet in some way, shallow though it may be on the floor of the House, it's all we've got because we only got a list of these earmarks this week, we're scolded and told that we're spurious for asking for just a smidgeon of accountability here for the sponsor of the earmark to stand up and justify why he thinks or she thinks that she has the ability to award a no-bid contract to a private company whose executives may turn around and give big amounts of money to that Member. That's being investigated in some cases by the Department of Justice. And we say, We should be able to do it, and no Member should be able to question it, that we shouldn't be able to raise it on the floor of the House. I just don't get it. Every time I think I have seen it all, I haven't. And today to be scolded for bringing amendments to the floor, and then to have the majority party bring 12 and to be told that we should be happy because they have seen fit to choose four of those amendments, allow us to offer them, and we should be somehow grateful and should embrace this rule just blows me away. I don't know what to say, Mr. Speaker. But I would urge this Congress not to move ahead with this bill in this fashion. There is no requirement that we have to do this today any more than you have to do health care this week or next week. We're a deliberative body, I hope; and we should deliberate just a little bit more. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FLAKE. I will yield to the gentleman.

Mr. FLAKE. I appreciate it. I have a very hardworking staff. They deserve a lot of credit. Also, since we have the chairman of the Appropriations Committee here and he was mentioning the process that's been gone through, and I, like our representative from the Rules Committee, are now learning who it seems controls what goes on in the Rules Committee. But I'm wondering why my unanimous consent request to simply swap amendments that were germane, like, for example, on financial services, the amendment to protect broadcaster freedom was not allowed. It came within the time constraints. It was germane. It was even offered last year and passed by an overwhelming margin. Why was unanimous consent not received to swap that? I would ask either the gentleman from the Rules Committee or the gentleman from the Appropriations Committee.

Mr. FLAKE. Mr. Speaker, I come here today completely baffled at this point. We've had in this appropriations season what can best be described as martial law, in legislative terms, where we've had appropriation bill after appropriation bill come to the floor under a closed rule or a modified structured rule, where the majority party decides which amendments the minority party can offer. I suppose they thought it was amusing at first. They claim it was an issue of time. And so some of us on this side that had amendments that were ruled in order asked unanimous consent to be able to substitute other Members' amendments that had not been ruled in order--amendments that were germane--that the majority party simply saw unfit for this party to vote on and debate. And 16 times that I have asked for unanimous consent, that unanimous consent has been denied. So it's not an issue of time at all. It's not an issue of time. As much as the majority party wants to stand up and say, We've got to get these finished because we have a time limit--for one, it's a pretty sorry excuse. We do appropriations. That's what the Congress does. And to say we've got to get these done in 1 day for the Defense bill next week, one day for Labor-HHS today, but then we find out that that's a ruse in itself, because if we agree to stay within the time constraints, then they still won't allow us to substitute the amendments that we would like to offer. On this bill, because the majority party had seen fit to give me several amendments on bills to cut earmarks that they knew would likely not pass because of the logrolling that takes effect here, I decided on this bill, although there were plenty of targets, I believe there were over a thousand earmarks in the bill, I decided not to offer one earmark amendment. So surely, surely the majority party would see fit to allow a few of my colleagues' amendments in order so they couldn't say, Oh, we gave you 10 amendments. Of course, 8 of those were Flake earmark amendments. But we gave you 10. So I didn't submit any. Not one. Our party submitted 12 amendments-- 12 amendments--and we were given 4. Just four amendments. One was given to I think the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and several, my understanding, were rolled into the manager's amendment. I would love to hear--and I will retain my time--but hear what the Rules Committee is thinking here, or why they see fit to deny the majority party the ability to offer amendments. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. FLAKE. Mr. Speaker, I raise a point of order against consideration of the rule because the resolution violates section 426(a) of the Congressional Budget Act. The resolution carries a waiver of all points of order against consideration of the bill, which includes a waiver of section 425 of the Congressional Budget Act which causes a violation of section 426(a).

Mr. FLAKE. I think the gentleman doth protest a little too much. We are here on the unfunded mandate thing because it's the only opportunity we've got. We've been shut out of just about everything else. We offered 12 amendments to a bill that typically has dozens and dozens and dozens and which typically we spend a couple of days on. We're told, ``We've got to get it done today, and we're only going to allow four amendments from the other side, and they are the four that we pick.'' I mean, what has this legislative body come to? I suppose the gentleman was referring to the 540 amendments that I have offered for the Defense bill. I have offered 540 because that represents the number of no-bid contracts that this body is authorizing for private companies in the Defense bill. That's why there are investigations swirling around this body. Yet we come to the floor and authorize 540-- not authorize--we appropriate money for 540 no-bid contracts. So I make no apology at all for offering 540 amendments. But I knew that I didn't want to tie the hands and tie up Legislative Counsel. That's something that I worry about. So we went to them and said, ``How can we do this without causing you trouble?'' They gave us a template, and we've done it all in our office. My staff and other staffs were up nearly all night last night, making 30 copies of 540 amendments on our own--not taking any of Legislative Counsel's time--just so we could do this body and this institution the favor of trying to actually vet some of the earmarks, no-bid contracts for private companies, that come through this body. And then we get scolded for that; and to say, ``You're taking up too much time. We've given you four amendments on this bill and you should be happy with it''? These crumbs that fall from the table, the Appropriations Committee and the Rules Committee, just be happy with it. Go on your merry way. It just is baffling. I don't know what else to say. I don't know what else we can do on this side. But bad process always begets bad policy, and it will come back to bite at some point. I just wish the majority party would realize that this martial law on appropriations bills is not justified. You shouldn't do it just because you can. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. FLAKE. Yes, I will.

Mr. FLAKE

Mr. FLAKE. I yield myself the balance of my time to answer the gentleman. I want to make the point that I'm not trying to delay the process. I could call a vote and waste 30 minutes. I'm not going to. I know the outcome here. That's not the point. The gentleman mentioned that I've been given a lot of amendments. I have, but it is only because the majority knows that they can beat them. And when I've offered to substitute some of my colleagues' amendments that were germane that simply weren't ruled in order, objection was raised 16 times to do that. So this isn't about time. This is about the majority wanting only the amendments that it wants to see on the floor. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FLAKE. Madam Speaker, I raise a point of order because the resolution violates section 426(a) of the Congressional Budget Act. The resolution contains a waiver against all points of order in the Congressional Budget Act which causes a violation of rule 426(a).

Mr. FLAKE. Again, I rise today not because this bill may or may not violate the Unfunded Mandates Act--it may or it may not. The question here is why, again, and we're near the end of the appropriations cycle and we've been living under what is the equivalent of legislative martial law, where the majority has stated that they cannot allow appropriation bills to come to the floor because we have to get through this process. We have to move through it. The Appropriations Committee chairman said, There is a limited numbers of hours between now and the time we recess. If we want to get our work done, we have to limit the debate time that we spend on these bills. Now, appropriating is one of the most--if not the most important-- thing that Congress does. We maintain the power of the purse under article 1. This is our responsibility. And to say that we've got to move through it quickly and so we have to deny the minority party the ability to offer the amendments it wants to offer simply because we have to make the trains run on time here. When the Republicans were in the majority, one Member said the other day that he was in the chair for over 3 days on the interior bill simply because Members on the majority side and the minority side had a lot of amendments they wanted to offer--3 days on the interior bill. Here we're allowing just an afternoon on the THUD bill. We're allowing just less than a day on the defense bill next week that contains more than a thousand earmarks that haven't been vetted by the Appropriations Committee, 540 of which are no-bid contracts to private companies. And we aren't allowing probably but a few, if history holds, amendments to that bill. And they will likely be amendments that the majority chooses. Last week, on a previous appropriation bill, I asked for unanimous consent 16 times on 16 amendments that I had to allow us to substitute an amendment that one of my colleagues had offered that was not allowed. So making the point that this isn't an issue of time; the time constraints were already set. We simply wanted to substitute amendments that we thought were maybe more important, that Members were denied the ability to offer, and we were rejected. Objection was raised 16 times to unanimous consent requests simply to substitute amendments. So we know what this is about. It's not about an issue of time, although that is a sorry excuse, frankly. When appropriating dollars is the most important thing we do here, we shouldn't limit ourselves to just a few days to get the appropriations process done on the floor. But even if you accept that, the minority party simply wanted to offer the amendments it wanted to offer, not the ones that the majority party had chosen for the minority party to offer and were denied 16 times. And here again today we're going to be discussing a bill. More than 70 amendments were offered to the Rules Committee. Only, I believe, 24 were ruled in order. We just had four or five Members offer privileged resolutions to make the point that their amendments, which were germane, which should have been allowed, were not allowed by the minority party. Madam Speaker, this isn't the way this House ought to be run. We're breaking from tradition here with the appropriations process, and at a time when we need more than ever to scrub these appropriations bills and make sure we're not spending money that we shouldn't be spending. We have a deficit that will near $2 trillion this year. When I came to Congress just 8 years ago, that was almost the entire Federal budget. Now our budget deficit will equal that amount, and yet we're throwing appropriation bills at the floor and saying got to get them done in 1 day and not allow the minority party to offer the amendments that it would like to offer. I would submit that while the majority party may think that they can get away with it because process arguments don't mean much outside the Beltway, I can see that. But a bad process begets bad policy, and sooner or later, it will come back to bite. And it just doesn't come back to bite the majority party; it comes back to haunt this institution. And institutionally, we ought to be better. We ought to have more regard for this institution than to simply break with precedent like this and deny the minority party the ability to offer the amendments I would like to offer.

Mr. FLAKE

Mr. FLAKE. I'll make a note before I yield to the gentleman from Utah. I recall that Eastern Market earmark for D.C., and I challenged that one as well. We shouldn't have distributed that money either. I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Utah.

Mr. FLAKE. The gentleman from Kentucky makes a wonderful point about overall spending. Earmarks represent a small portion of Federal spending, a very small portion. The problem is, as my colleague in the Senate Dr. Coburn calls them, the gateway drug to spending addiction. And the problem with earmarks is that when you load them up in bills, you will support bills, both the majority and the minority, that you would in no other case support. Now, take for example, in 2005, we reauthorized the highway bill. In that bill, it was a $285 billion multiyear authorization. We knew because the chairman of the Appropriations Committee stood up at that time and said, We don't have the money in this bill to fund what is being authorized. We're going to run short. Sure enough, we've run short. We had to transfer $8 billion into that bill just a while ago. We were asked to transfer another $6 billion, and there will be more and more. But you know why that bill passed when everybody in this body knew that we were spending money we didn't have? Because it had 6,300 earmarks in it, and nearly every Member of this body had some. And they knew that if they didn't support it, they might get their earmarks yanked out when it went to conference. That's the problem with this body, and that's the problem with earmarks. Earmarks are much greater than the sum of their parts. They force you to support bills you would in no other case support simply because you've got your earmarks in and you have to support that bill. And so, that's the problem here. And then year after year, we say, ``Well, they're only a small part, and if we cut funding for this earmark, it won't cut funding for the bill. It will just go somewhere else,'' when we could, if we wanted to, simply lower the allocation for the bill by the amount that the earmarks represent. But we don't do that so we can use the excuse later that we can't get rid of these earmarks because it won't save any money. Well, I don't think the people across the country are buying that. They've heard that song too much. We'll have a deficit this year that might approach $2 trillion. We need to start somewhere, and I would suggest we start here. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FLAKE. Again, we have here, this is money going to a technology park. Where in the world is the Federal nexus there, I would ask. Why is it that we're being asked, as taxpayers in California and New Mexico, Arizona, New York, to pay for a technology park to attract businesses in Pennsylvania? Under that kind of rubric, what wouldn't qualify for money? Why wouldn't we just scatter money all over? Apparently we have, with a $2 trillion deficit, but we can't continue to do that. One thing that these technology parks and money for them typically does, they're usually called new business incubators, and what they turn out to be incubators of is earmarks. In fact, this very project received a $500,000 earmark 2 years ago, and my bet is that next year, or the year after or so, there will be another earmark for the same project because you can never have enough business for a district. No Member of Congress will ever take the podium and say, Hey, I've got too much business in my district. We don't need to construct another technology park. We can't use another earmark. Please, no more. It's going to continue to go and go and go. But where do we stop? Where do we say enough is enough? We can't continue to put out money this way. I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. FLAKE. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. FLAKE. May I inquire as to the time remaining?

Mr. FLAKE. He makes the point exactly. We shouldn't appropriate this money at all. This money for economic development should stay in the hands of small business before it's taxed and let them do with it as they will: cut their payroll tax, cut something else, leave it with them. Don't take it and then distribute it by means of congressional earmark or Federal bureaucrat fiat. I'm saying don't spend it that way. But if we don't like how they do it, let's not create a parallel program that is just as inequitable. I yield back the balance of my time.

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