Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I have just one observation to make about the remarks of the previous speaker when he indicated that the Speaker did not want to hear the truth. I would simply observe that when the VA several years ago was insisting that the administration's budget for veterans' health care was insufficient to meet the needs, the Speaker heard the truth and acted on it. And as a result, even in the teeth of fierce opposition from the administration, she insisted that we provide another $1 billion to the veterans' health care budget. And eventually, even the VA came to admit that that money was needed. When veterans' organizations after our party took control of the Congress 1.5 years ago, when those veterans' organizations told us that we needed to provide at least $3.5 billion more than the President's budget had provided for veterans' health care, she heard the truth and she acted on it. The Speaker need never take a back seat to the gentleman from Indiana or anyone else in this chamber when it comes to hearing the truth and acting on it when it concerns America's veterans. She made quite clear that the welfare of American veterans was going to be her number one budget priority when she became Speaker, because she was objecting to the fact that the only families in America who ever had to make any sacrifice because of the Iraq war were military families. That was indeed a truth which she not only heard but saw and acted upon, and this House can be proud of that on both sides of the aisle. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I rise to oppose the amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman said that projects in this bill are allocated on the basis of one's power and influence. Well, I think, when it comes to the appropriations process and since I'm the chairman of the committee--and I'm a fairly powerful or influential person except when I'm at home with my wife--I would, nonetheless, say that I have no projects whatsoever in this bill--none, zip. I would also say that, whether you like the reforms that have been instituted in the last 2 years or not, just about the only reforms that have been instituted on the earmarking process have been sponsored by me, and I think the House knows what they are. We wouldn't even be on the floor tonight, dealing with these in this way, had it not been for those reforms. I want to make a point: Regardless of what individual Members think about earmarking, there are certain appropriations which by their very nature require earmarking. There are other bills that by their very nature do not. This is one of the three that does. You've got the Military Construction bill; you've got the energy and water bill, and you've got the interior bill. Large portions, if not all of those bills, are simply construction accounts. When it comes to construction accounts, those projects are in the main, requested and defined by the administration. The overwhelming majority of projects in this bill are selected by the executive branch. This bill includes 518 total earmarks: 408 earmarks, 79 percent of them, were included at the request of the administration. Of the 110 other earmarks, on its own initiative, the committee added seven earmarks to improve better training barracks and medical facilities for soldiers, marines and their families. They were not added at the request of particular Members, but they are in this bill, nonetheless, and the committee makes no apology for them. I would also point out that 103 of these projects were added at the request of a Member. One hundred two of them are military construction projects, and one is a VA project. All of the military construction earmarks, including the quality of life projects, were also included in the authorization bill, and the VA earmark is included subject to authorization. There is no difference between what the Congress does in earmarking military construction and what the White House does when it requests earmarks for military construction. For example, five different Members, Democrats and Republicans alike, asked the committee to provide the second phase of a facility, $7.5 million, to support a facility for a pararescue unit at the Gabreski Air National Guard base in New York. Now, the sponsors of this amendment, evidently, are going to crow about cutting 103 earmarks. Let's look at what they will actually be cutting. They will be cutting Air Force runways, aircraft refueling stations, training facilities, maintenance facilities, fire stations, chapels, barracks, control towers, firing ranges, and so on. You would be hard- pressed to find a substantive difference between these projects and the other 408 contained in the bill. The only difference is that they have not been blessed by the White House. Now, apparently, the sponsors of this amendment believe that the only spending that is legitimate is that which is blessed by the executive branch. Well, this document, the Constitution, reads as follows: ``No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.'' It doesn't say, ``only in consequence of funds requested by the executive.'' It doesn't say, ``Only spending by the executive is sacrosanct.'' It says that Congress has the responsibility of making these decisions. Now, Congress may make some wise choices. It may make some bad choices. So may the executive branch. I would submit that, regardless of your attitude about earmarks in general, it is ludicrous to say that you cannot have the Congress using its judgment on occasion to decide where money ought to go in the development of facilities on military bases, just as it would be ludicrous to say that, for the Army Corps of Engineers in the energy and water bill, the only projects that are worthwhile proceeding with are those which are requested by the executive branch. I invite you to take a look at the way a number of accounts in the executive branch have been turned into political slush funds. Take the Reading First program. Look at the major job training program in the Department of Labor. There are ample examples of abuse of the earmarking process in the executive branch and in the legislative branch. Our obligation, in my view, is not within the process of trying to dig those out to throw the baby out with the bath water. I think this committee has done a responsible job in making its judgments about what those projects ought to be. If the gentleman is concerned about members of the Appropriations Committee who he feels have an inordinate number of earmarks, well, I have none. Yet I stand here tonight, defending this process, because at least, on this bill, I think there is very little to be said for the idea that only the executive branch may make choices about whether barracks or hospitals or daycare centers are built to facilitate the convenience of military families. This bill is an example of Congress' meeting its responsibilities and controlling the power of the purse.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1284, I call up from the Speaker's table the bill (H.R. 2642) making appropriations for military construction, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008, and for other purposes, with the Senate amendments to the House amendments to the Senate amendment thereto, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I offer the motion at the desk.

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentleman, and I yield 1 minute to the distinguished Speaker of the House.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the pending legislation.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, we've heard a lot of comments tonight about what there should or should not be in this legislation, and I agree with many of those comments. And honestly, just once, acting as chairman of a committee, I would like to put together a bill which reflects my priorities. But that is not usually what chairmen have to do in this place. What we have to do is try to find a consensus that will gather 218 votes and be sustained over time. And on this bill, there are some peculiar problems because, very frankly, we have a very different constituency in this House for continuing the war in Iraq than we have for most of the other items in the bill and, therefore, we had to find a way to allow each and every Member of the House to express his or her opinion. We had to try to find a way to allow each and every Member to vote their convictions in a way which would not keep the House tied up in knots for another 6 months. Now, the way we did that was to adopt a procedure under which we took a conference report pending between the Senate and the House, and used that as the device by which each House would express their preferences, and we would work our way to a solution. Our committee is often criticized because we wind up producing omnibus appropriations in which everything is thrown into one package, and people are forced to vote up or down on the entire package. What we tried to do this time was to do just the opposite, to disaggregate these issues so that people would have a chance to vote separately on the major propositions in the legislation. And that is why the House sent to the Senate originally three amendments. We sent one amendment that would fund the operations for Iraq and Afghanistan. We sent a second amendment which stipulated the conditions under which the first amendment money could be expended. And then we had a third amendment which laid out, basically, other domestic priorities or associated military priorities that we thought were important. And we sent it to the Senate, and it included a number of items about which questions have been raised tonight. In addition to the expanded GI benefits for veterans and unemployment compensation, we tried to protect the Medicaid safety net by having a moratorium on seven Medicaid regulations. We also had a number of restrictions on Iraq policy, one requiring that any money that is expended for reconstruction by the State Department or USAID be matched dollar for dollar by the Iraqi Government so that they would begin to pick up a fair share of the cost of redeveloping their own country. We also had language with respect to trying to assure that there would be no permanent bases in Iraq. We had funding $2.2 billion above the President's level for military construction and veterans' hospitals, and we fully funded BRAC. Someone asked earlier on the floor today why did we have $178 million in this war supplemental for the Bureau of Prisons. Very simple. Because the executive agency asked for the money because if we don't, there are going to be prison guards laid off because there has been a heavier than expected Federal prison population. And that may not be an emergency to Members of Congress, but if you're one of those prison guards who's working shorthanded under dangerous situations, you don't want to have people laid off in those Federal prisons. And so we sent that package over to the Senate, and the Senate added roughly 37 additional items which cost $10 billion and which the House felt, in many instances, did not accurately reflect emergency expenditure funds. So the Senate sent those amendments back to us, and among other things, they stripped out totally the conditions on the war. That is why I will personally vote against amendment No. 1 because I would vote for that amendment provided that we had a set of reasonable conditions in defining what our national policy is in Iraq. Absent those conditions, I don't intend to vote for that amendment. But I do intend to vote for the second amendment, and I want to take just a moment to explain what was in it. Primarily, we do three important things: We, first of all, create a new program to provide greatly expanded education benefits for American veterans under the GI Bill. We have some Members of this House who are unhappy about the fact that that is not paid for. I am among them. But I would point out that the entire war is not being paid for. Mr. Murtha and I and Mr. McGovern tried to offer the House an opportunity to vote to pay for the entire war. We did not, frankly, find much enthusiasm for that on either side of the political aisle. But we stipulated that we felt that if that war was going to be fought, even though I personally think it's the most misguided war since the War of 1812, nonetheless, we felt if the war was going to be fought, at least we ought to pay for it so we didn't pass the cost down to our grandkids. That has not happened. My point is simply that if we aren't going to pay for the war, then I feel no particular guilt about saying to the GIs who have fought the war that we aren't going to provide you with the equivalent of a 4-year college education because we have had no sense of self-sacrifice in this country except on the part of military families. They've been asked to sacrifice again and again and again while the rest of us have been asked to go shopping or swallow a tax cut. And I think that's illegitimate. We lost the argument on funding the war, and it just seems to me that it is a peculiar view of proportion if people get exercised about not paying for the GI Bill expansion but don't get exercised about not paying for the war. It would take over 50 years of paying benefits under this new expanded GI Bill. It would take more than 50 years to spend as much money on veterans as will be spent in a 2-year period in Iraq. And so I make no apology. While I would prefer that it be paid for, I make no apology for the fact that, in the end, it wasn't. This is the only way that we could get the United States Senate and the administration to accept the expanded GI Bill. And I think we owe it to those veterans to provide it no matter what the budgetary niceties are. Secondly, with respect to unemployment compensation. We wound up essentially--and I want to thank Mr. Rangel especially for the work he did in conference yesterday. The House initially sent over a package which provided 13 weeks of expanded unemployment benefits for every State in the country and then provided an additional 13 weeks on top of that for States with high unemployment rates. The administration, as you know, Mr. Speaker, did not want that. They objected to it. So we looked for various ways to try to salvage as much of that as we could. In the end, we adopted changes which bring the cost of that down from about $10 billion to $8 billion. So we have retained 80 percent of the original unemployment compensation provision. We've made two changes. We have agreed with the administration's request to require 20 weeks of work history if a person is going to be eligible for that, and we also dropped the second step, the targeting of those benefits. We will have to deal with that issue on another bill in another venue. The third issue that was causing great controversy was the fact that we were trying to place a moratorium on seven Medicaid regulations that the administration was trying to impose that would cut services to seniors, families, and those with disabilities. In the end, we got six of those seven in the package. I think that's doing pretty well. Because of the new disasters that we have had around the country, certainly most visible in Iowa recently, the administration agreed to $1.8 billion in disaster funding. This bill comes in considerably higher than that at $2.65 billion. That's basically the outline of what we have done. And there are several other items in the bill. One that Members should be aware of, if we do not get our appropriation bills done by the end of the fiscal year--that has been known to happen from time to time around here--if that doesn't happen, then if we were to proceed for a short time on a continuing resolution, Israel would wind up receiving $170 million less than the President's budget. We did not want that to happen. And so we are including in this bill a provision which guarantees that as of October 1, that even if we were to pass a continuing resolution at last year's level, Israel would not be accidentally shortchanged by that action and they would get that additional $170 million. There are a number of other provisions in the bill, but I think most Members are familiar with them. Most of these items have been around for quite a while. And so with that, Mr. Speaker, I would like to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished majority leader, Mr. Hoyer.

Mr. OBEY. I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from New York, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Rangel. I want to thank Mr. Rangel for the work he did in conference. (Mr. RANGEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott). (Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Let me simply take this opportunity to thank the staff, especially Rob Nabors, on our side of the aisle. And I want to especially also thank Mr. Murtha and Senator Inouye and Mr. Young for the work they did in fashioning amendment No. 1 that we have before us today. I also want to thank Mr. Rangel, certainly Mr. Hoyer, and the Speaker for all of the work that they have done in bringing us to this point. And I also want to thank especially Mr. Boehner, who certainly has been integral to achieving this today. And also Mr. Lewis and Cantor, who have worked consistently on this, and I appreciate the work they did even through yesterday. And one more thank you to Senator Webb and to Representative Herseth Sandlin in this House for leading the efforts to see that we did have an expanded GI Bill benefit for veterans, and also Senator Reid. And now let me inquire, does the gentleman have any other speakers?

Mr. OBEY. I intend to have the Speaker do the closing. Would you like to finish before I ask her to close?

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, no one can visit the American cemetery at Normandy without gaining a profound appreciation for the courage and the sense of self-sacrifice demonstrated by every one of our soldiers who fought to take that beach and begin the liberation of Europe. For years, families who went to that cemetery to think about their loved ones, think about their loss and, at the same time, think about their pride, had a totally inadequate place in which to sit and think or perhaps retreat from the rest of the people around them for a few precious moments. And I am so pleased that I was able to work with Congressman Murtha, with Congressman Walsh, with Congressman Hobson, in order to provide the funding for the new visitors center which is now at that location. It is a spectacularly beautiful, and yet subtle tribute to each and every American who fought there. For years, that visitors center did not tell an adequate story of the sense of self-sacrifice that was exhibited in those days. Now it finally does, and I think it will serve as an inspiration, not just to every American who visits that site, but also to every person from any part of the world who values freedom and values sacrifice. I know of no monument that is more eloquent in paying tribute to both than that monument, and I think it's fitting that we pass a resolution, again, praising the courage and the dedication of the Americans who fought to make the entire world free.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Can you name one or can't you? The fact is there's not a single piece of Member pork in this bill. You ought to know.

Mr. OBEY. We got requests in writing from the agencies.

Mr. OBEY. They testified before the committees. I don't know if you were there or not, but they testified. Announcement By the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. OBEY. I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from Texas.

Mr. OBEY. I want to make sure the gentleman's rights are protected. You indicated to me that you wanted the minority leader to close debate on your side?

Mr. OBEY. I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I offer the motion at the desk.