Marcy Kaptur

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Could I ask the gentleman to clarify something for me? I heard what he said and that he wants an honest budget process. Our subcommittee came in exactly as we were told on the mark we were given. He does not like the marks the subcommittees were given?

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Ms. KAPTUR. But that is my question to the gentleman. Obviously there is a problem on your side of the aisle. What is the mechanism for you to solve that problem internal to your caucus without dividing us on this floor? You had a budget. You did 13 appropriation allocations. What went wrong?

Ms. KAPTUR. If the gentleman will yield further, I would forget the White House. My advice to your side of the aisle is: You have the majority. You do the budget you want to do. If you have got a problem with the other side over there, with the S-e-n-a-t-e, then deal with whatever that is. I do not know who is cutting the deals for you, but do not do this to our bill. I do not understand. The gentleman's party has the majority. You can produce whatever bill you want.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding to me, and I wanted to clarify a couple of matters here for the Record in terms of this amendment. First of all, the amendment of the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) is to page 13, line 11, which reads: $62,916,000 for special grants for agricultural research. The gentleman's amendment proposes to eliminate $1 million from that account. Am I correct in reading the gentleman's amendment? That is exactly what the gentleman's amendment states, page 13 line 11.

Ms. KAPTUR. I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I would just like to state for the record that the gentleman clarified something very important that I would like to put on the Record, and that is the industrial fund match in each of these centers: at Mississippi State, an average of $783,458 for the last 5 years; Oregon State University, over $670,000; Michigan State University, $605,000, and the list goes on. We will submit it for the Record. But the point is there are not only industry matches, there are also State matches. So this is truly a Federal, State, private sector cooperative program, and I thank the gentleman for coming to the floor.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman, and I just wanted to say for the record there was some references made a little bit earlier to the role of this House and the other body in preparing a budget and approving a budget, the role of the White House. I just wanted to mention that normally the way government at the Federal level works is that the Congress prepares and passes bills. The President can propose, but it is our job to dispose, and when we finish our work, and it is ours to finish, we send it to the White House, and under the Constitution he has only two options: sign the bill or veto the bill. So I do not really understand all this extralegal negotiation that may be referenced here on the floor and so forth. We have our job to do, and we ought to do it, and if the President does not like what we do, then let him use his constitutional powers to veto and we will override, or we will come back to the drawing board and do this again. But truly we are not meeting our constitutional responsibilities through the kind of dilatory tactics that we have experienced now on the floor for over 2 days. I do not remember when I have seen a bill, an appropriations bill for certain, come to the floor with hundreds of amendments filed on one particular subcommittee like this one. So I just wanted to say to the leadership of this institution, ``Do your job, send the bill over to the White House, and if they don't like it, let them veto it. If they like it, let them sign it. But let's not be bound up by some sort of private conversations which none of us here on this floor are party to. Let's do our job. That's our constitutional responsibility.''

Ms. KAPTUR. I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

Ms. KAPTUR. What would make the gentleman happy? This process cannot make him happy. He is nit-picking a bill apart on the floor. What does he want?

Ms. KAPTUR. I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I just wanted to say to the gentleman that under the budget they produced, we have done our job. We have met their budget mark. We are not the problem. He is making us a victim. He is anticipating the problem to come with some other bills. Well, if the gentleman does not like the marks on those bills, go fix that, but why is the gentleman making us the victim?

Ms. KAPTUR. We are today, we were yesterday.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I say to the gentleman from Cleveland, Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) that I thank him very much for bringing this to the Nation's attention. He is a leader on this issue, and I look forward to working with our chairman to find an answer to this as we move toward the conference.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I say to the gentlewoman that she is correct about the lack of funding for historically black colleges and universities. While the bill contains programmatic funding for these institutions, such as capacity-building grants, we must do more for historically black colleges and universities that can make valuable contributions to agricultural research and really deserve the support of this Nation. I promise that I will work with the gentlewoman and the chairman, the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Skeen) of our subcommittee and my colleagues on the full committee to address this problem as the bill moves through the process and through conference, particularly starting with report language to require the Department to report back to us on what is currently being done, if anything, so we can establish the baseline for the future.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the amendment dealing with research by the Agricultural Research Service for the Monarch butterfly. Let me just say that the Committee on Agriculture, which the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Skeen) chairs and of which I am the ranking member, is the chief ecosystem committee of this Congress, and I believe, of this country. There is an expression: ``You can't fool Mother Nature.'' There are some fundamental questions being raised here by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) that are very important to the future of botanical life and biological life in our country. Because we have never before had these genetically engineered crops, we really do not know their long- term impacts. I know recent articles in Scientific American and many newpapers indicate that as a result of butterflies, which are essential to pollinating crops so we can produce fruit and corn, and representing the eastern part of the eastern corn belt, we know something about corn and soybeans, and these butterflies are essential to our future. After being impacted by this pollen, 40 percent of them died. 40 percent. This is a profound result. So I think the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) brings to us a very important and current finding that is well deserving of research. I also would say to the gentleman, I thank him for doing this, because I know he represents the inner part of Cleveland, Ohio; and one of my greatest concerns as another American is that we have the first generation of Americans now that have no connection to the land. We have literally raised the first generation of people in the Nation's history who do not spend the majority of their time raising their food or with any connection to production at all, so they are divorced from the experiences that he is talking about. I would just say, for someone from Cleveland, Ohio, a major city in this country, to bring this amendment to the floor, to me, in some ways is a modern-day miracle. So I want to thank the gentleman, and I look forward to supporting him.

Ms. KAPTUR. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I object.

Ms. KAPTUR. What process? The gentleman's process?

Ms. KAPTUR. I yield to the gentleman from New Mexico.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I will not take long, but to say I should have said this yesterday as I began my remarks on this Agricultural Appropriations bill for the Year 2000. And that is that I am very indebted to the people from back home who have sent me here to serve on their behalf. A number of them are farmers and have spent their life in production and in agriculture. I want to recognize a few of them on the floor today, in particular, Ray Zwyer and Thelma Zwyer, who are now, I believe, Social Security recipients. And I know Ray is undergoing kidney dialysis several times a week. I want to thank him and his wife, Thelma, for everything they taught me about agriculture, for taking me out on my first combine, for helping me understand chicken production and poultry production, for helping me to understand direct marketing and how hard it was for the average farm family in this country to make it, to watch their son Tom and his children and their family to try to carry on the family tradition on that farm in Monclova Township. I want to thank his brother, Howard, and his wife, Eleanor Zwyer, right across the street, for all the hard work they have done to create and keep in our area production agriculture. I also want to thank Herman and Emma Gase up the street, who have worked so very hard to raise their family. And I notice they had a couple of pieces of equipment for sale in their front yard this past week. I also want to thank Melva and Pete Plocek. Pete is the one that taught me what it is like to have wet beans and that they do not get as much when they take them to the elevator. There are so many people like this back in our community who truly represent rural life in this country, the very best traditions of our Nation. And I just want to thank them for letting me try to be their voice here, as well as the one million farm families across our country who expect us to do the job for them in this bill. Amendment Offered by Mr. Coburn

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I also rise in opposition to the gentleman's amendment. Let me say in terms of Social Security, the most important input to Social Security's Trust Fund is an America that is working and that is productive. Therefore, the reason we have seen the revenues bounce up in Social Security is because the economy has been stronger in the last several years than in past decades. And so the most important thing we can do is help people's incomes rise and help people keep working so that that revenue flow increases. The Social Security Trust Fund is not a static fund. It is a fund that is very connected to what is happening in production America, whether it is in the industrial plants, whether it is in agriculture or in our service industries. Rural America, however, right now is in serious crisis. It is in depression. Our job here should be to be partners with rural America in helping them pull out of the tailspin that they are in so that they again can become productive partners, contributing to the national well-being as well as their own well-being. And so I would say to the gentleman, I think his efforts to try to be responsible and to deal with the budget issue here are admirable. However, in the context of the way we function as the Congress, we are one of 13 committees. We have been given the budget mark against which we must not go over. When we bump our heads up against it, we know we cannot go over. As the gentleman admitted on the floor yesterday, we have done our job on this committee. Now, other committees have spending that is cut several hundred million dollars. That is all balanced out by the leadership of your party. Therefore, we on the Committee on Agriculture in some ways are insulted by the fact that you would try to go line item by line item inside our accounts and say, ``Well, this isn't important'' or ``This isn't important'' when we have so many tradeoffs that we have had to try to make, especially in Depression level conditions like rural America is facing today. This agricultural research account is critical, because it is the future. If America is going to have a future in agriculture, it is built on the research that is being done every day by scientists who are not given enough credit here in Congress or in general in the country. If you look at some of the costs to our economy where we do not have answers, something like soybean nematode which takes 25 percent of our crop, if we could produce 100 percent of the crop or 90 percent rather than 75 percent, how much more wealth and buying power and income that would add to our rural sector. In the South, something like a corn earworm costs farmers over $1.5 billion annually in losses, in chemical costs. We do not have answers to that problem. These may seem like funny names to people who do not live in rural America but to people who face this every day, these are vital problems. We had the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley) yesterday talk about the Asian Longhorn beetle infecting New York City as well as Illinois. Maple sugar producers in my area are scared to death that that thing is going to come across the State and cause billions of dollars worth of damage and kill all of our hardwoods. These are not simple issues. We need answers to these questions. The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) was just here on the floor talking about the problem with the Monarch butterfly. We do not have an answer to why nearly half the Monarchs in this country are dying, but we better find an answer because if we do not, production agriculture goes down, income goes down and we do not have dollars flowing into that Social Security Trust Fund. I would just say to the gentleman also in my time here that he keeps looking at the accounts in our overall budget and he says, ``Well, this one is going up,'' but he does not look at the ones that went down. We have a lot of accounts, for instance, our surplus commodities and foreign food shipments account has gone down by over $25 million, our P.L. 480 title I by over $11 million, all of our rural community advancement programs by over $56 million. You look at our Agricultural Credit Insurance Fund by over $18 million, the Agricultural Research Service buildings and facilities, over $11 million. So we feel that we have done what we need to do in each of these accounts, but I would beg the gentleman not to cut America's future, not cut her seed corn for the future by cutting these agricultural research accounts. And also to say to the gentleman, go back to your leadership. If you have got a budget problem, do not put it all on the backs of this subcommittee. We have done our job, we have met our mark. We are proud of the work that we have done. I rise in strong opposition to the gentleman's amendment.