Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct conferees.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe one thing that I just heard. The distinguished gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula) I believe said that if this were to be included in the conference report, the White House would veto the bill. I really want to see whether this President has the unmitigated gall to veto this bill because of protections that we place in the bill so that workers do not have to work more than 40 hours a week and still not be paid overtime. I want to see whether the President who has presided over the loss of 3 million jobs in this economy has the unmitigated gaul to then say to those workers, ``Sorry, folks, you've got to work more than 40 hours without collecting overtime. Now, I believe, given his track record, he would like to do that, but very frankly, I doubt that he has got the moxie to do that in the teeth of the miserable economic performance that he has provided this country on the economic front. It is outrageous to even think that the President would veto this bill over this provision. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I assume that came out of the gentleman's time?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I was not asking that.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I have parliamentary inquiry. I was just trying to determine whether the gentleman's last remarks came out of his time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Georgia always gives a fine speech on the floor. The problem is he just gave a fine speech against a proposition that is not being offered. The fact is that the motion that we are offering today does, I repeat does, D-O-E-S, does allow the Labor Department regulations that add people to overtime protection. We do accept those updated definitions. What we do not accept is the President unilaterally, without congressional action, knocking off from the overtime protection rolls workers who now have that protection. The gentleman also says not a single union member will be affected by the Labor Department's suggested rulings. Let me point out two things. First of all, we ought to be worried about all workers, not just union workers; and, secondly, the fact is that right now unions do not have to negotiate this overtime provision in their contracts. Right now they have the protection of the law. If this is removed, then that is just another way that you are going to unbalance the bargaining table against workers by forcing them to have to go back and negotiate something which they have had by right since 1938. I dare the administration to go into any union hall in this country or any working plant in this country and claim to be a friend of workers if they veto this bill over our efforts to stop that kind of unilateral action. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Lynch). (Mr. LYNCH asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Boswell). (Mr. BOSWELL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller). (Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. I will simply repeat again, the effect of this motion does not deny the Labor Department the right to add a single worker to overtime protections that they provide under their adjustments. All it does is to prevent, to prevent workers who now have that overtime protection from losing it. It is just that simple. I am the author of the motion. I think I know what it says. I think I know what it means. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Michaud).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bell).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Linda T. Sanchez).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, how much time do we have?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich).

Mr. OBEY. I thank the Chair for that clarification. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to make sure that was the case because despite the comments of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula), under our proposal that we are offering today, any worker who is added to the overtime protection rules by the new proposed rule is, by our motion, allowed to get that overtime protection. The only effect of our motion is to prevent the Department of Labor from knocking people off the overtime protection rules. I have said it for the fourth time. I think I said it in English. I think the meaning is clear. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 20 seconds. Again, that was a nice speech, but it was prepared against a proposition that is not before us. The proposition before us does allow the modernization of the law. There, I have said it. I have said it five times in a row. It would be nice if someone heard it and paid attention. Otherwise we might as well adjourn because we are talking past each other. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Despite the hyperventilation we have just heard, the fact is that there will be up to 8 million workers hurt unless this motion is passed.

Mr. OBEY. No, I will not. The gentleman has had his time to bloviate. This is my time. As I was saying, Mr. Speaker, the issue is very simple. Are you going to protect the up to 8 million workers who will be knocked out of protection for overtime if this motion does not pass? That is the only issue before us, despite all the other claims to the contrary. In a few short moments, we will see who cares about workers and who does not. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the minority leader.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 14 minutes. Mr. Speaker, this continuing resolution will, I assume, be known as the Halloween appropriation bill for the year 2003, because what it does is to extend government activities until October 31 of this coming year. I am looking around the floor, looking for the chickens, and I do not see any. And I am a little confused by that, because this is the day that the chickens come home to roost. I guess they are invisible, much like much of the truth is in the budget resolution that passed earlier this year. But I think we need to understand how we got to this situation today. As of today, even though we are supposed to have all 13 appropriation bills passed by October 1, plus any supplementals for that fiscal year, despite that fact, this House has passed only three of the 13 conference reports that it would have to pass on appropriation bills in order to do its work. Now, that is not the fault of the Committee on Appropriations; it certainly is not the fault of the gentleman from Florida. The problem is that we have a budget process which has been stood on its head. The idea behind the original budget resolution was that it was supposed to force all of the players in the Congress to face reality. Instead, it has been used increasingly each year by the House Republican leadership to assist the House in avoiding reality and ignoring reality. What happens is this: the budget resolution for the year is produced by a committee that has absolutely no responsibility to implement it. The Committee on the Budget produces unreal numbers; they produce numbers that pretend that this Congress will spend less money than will actually wind up being spent on discretionary appropriations. It pretends in the budget resolution, as it did in April, that budget resolution pretended that we were going to meet the goals that many moderate Republicans had in this House for special education and for the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance. And then as soon as the budget resolution was passed, then the Committee on Appropriations is given the responsibility to deliver reality. And because the majority did not provide sufficient room in the budget resolution for this House to meet the promises that were laid out in the Republican budget resolution, then the Committee on Appropriations is stuck with the job of being the bad guy messenger. So then poor Ralph Regula, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, has to come to the floor and say, ``Sorry, boys and girls, we do not have enough room in the resolution to do what we promised we would do just 3 weeks ago.'' So we cannot fund special education the way we were going to fund it, and we cannot keep our promises on title I or the No Child Left Behind Act, and the list goes on and on and on. So because that budget resolution starts out with an unrealistic set of numbers, then the next 6 months the House and the other body try to get a double hernia trying to lift enough weight in order to get and pack all of these obligations into a tiny overall budget ceiling bag, and they cannot do it because they cannot repeal the basic laws of mathematics. So now we are here with only three of the 13 appropriation bills passed. Last year when this happened, our friends on the majority side of the aisle blamed the other body because it was under Democratic control. Well, this year that is not the case. This year the Republican Party has all the marbles. They run the House, they run the Senate, they run the White House, and on good days, they even run the Supreme Court. And now what happened is that they do not have anybody to blame anymore. And the fact is, right now the majority Republican Party is having a fight with itself and it cannot win the debate. So it is stuck. And so the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), who has done his job, I mean the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) has been a loyal soldier, followed his marching orders, even though the orders produced turkey results. He is a good, loyal soldier, and he has followed them; and so now he has to come to the floor and say, ``Folks, guess what, because the budget resolution was not real, we have not been able to move these bills forward, and so we are stuck way behind on the calendar.'' And that is not the whole story. In addition, yesterday we had a hearing on the supplemental for Iraq. Now, we were told in March of this year by the wizard who ran OMB for the past 2 years, Mitch Daniels, we were told by the resident wizard over there that Iraq was only going to cost the $60 billion that the White House had already asked for in their first appropriation and there would not be any more need for money for Iraq for this year. They were only off by $87 billion. So now we have got to come in and pass a supplemental, even though the witnesses yesterday did not have a clue, or at least they would not tell us if they did, about what it was going to cost us over the next 5 years to carry out, not our program, but their program in Iraq. So, very frankly, this Congress has no budget process at this point. The truth is revealed to us on the installment plan by the administration in terms of the cost of the effort for Iraq, and the truth is obscured as far as the domestic budget is concerned in order to maintain the fiction that, even though we have conducted a unilateral war, we can afford to continue to provide $88,000 tax cuts to millionaires in this country, and that is the biggest fiction of all. So this bill is here trying to put a reality patch on an Alice in Wonderland fairy tale which is what the budget resolution has been. And so I do not blame the press for not covering it. This is too absurd a story to cover, and so we are left here facing inevitability; and we have no choice but to pass this resolution today. Now, I would like to think that we would see a new sense of reality in the coming months, but I do not think so; and I go back to the conversation that I had years ago with Dick Bolling who served in this House, very distinguished career, and who wrote the Budget Act under which the budget resolution comes to the floor every year. Dick Bolling told me the night before he finalized his recommendations that he had one hard choice to make. He said, ``I do not know whether we should set up the Committee on the Budget so that people who are on the Committee on the Budget are people who represent the power centers in this institution, like the Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on Ways and Means and the other committees with direct spending authority. I do not know whether we ought to require that it be made up of people like that or whether we ought to require that it be made up of independent players appointed by the caucuses without respect to what committees they serve on.'' He decided to do the latter. But when he did, he said, ``If the party leaders do not take this process seriously and if they do not use it to force reality, then,'' he said, ``I will have made a bad mistake. '' And in fact, I think what has happened is that the majority party leadership has decided to use the budget process, not as an instrument to force Members of Congress to make hard choices but, rather, as an instrument that facilitates the pretense that we can have it all. And so we pretend that we can provide $3 trillion-plus in tax cuts, even though we no longer have the surpluses that we had, that we were expecting when those tax cuts were passed. We pretend we can fight a war in Iraq and charge every single dime to our grandchildren, and we pretend that that war will not have a consequence in terms of denied opportunities for kids to get a decent education and denied opportunities for people without health care to get some coverage. We pretend there are no consequences to the free- lunch budget that this place has passed. Well, there are in the real world, outside of this Chamber. And in this Chamber, probably the least consequential consequence is that we get stuck with having to pass a CR. Now, this is not the first time that this has happened, but each year the problem gets worse because each year the Committee on Appropriations is asked to perform an act that is more and more impossible because the budget resolution is less and less responsible and real. And sooner or later we will come to the conclusion that the only way to return credibility to this House on the budget matter is to start with a budget resolution that makes sense and is honest in the first place. We have not done that in years; and I will readily grant that in some years, when our party was in control, we did not have budget resolutions that were the finest in the world either. But none of them, none of them departed as much from reality as the budget resolutions the last 3 years in this place; and so that is why we are here today, not because the Committee on Appropriations has not done its work, but because the Committee on Appropriations is asked to perform an impossible act. It is supposed to tell the truth in the context of a budget resolution which is a public lie; and that, no one can do. So I sympathize with the gentleman from Florida. I will support this resolution because it is the only alternative we have, but the reasons we are here, indeed, do no great credit to this institution. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman indicated that the budget resolution required a great degree of creativity. I would like to explain to the House what one of those creative measures has been. Last year, in order to pretend that the budget resolution provided adequate funding for education, the committee provided what was known as ``advance funding'' for education to the tune of $2.2 billion. That meant that, for Enron accounting purposes, that $2.2 billion, which was appropriated last year, was not going to count until the next fiscal year, 2004; but now, guess what. Now we are at the end of fiscal 2003. So nobody is watching what happens to the deficit for 2003 anymore. So what happens instead is that now we get a double reverse because this proposal, this resolution today contains a gimmick that can only be labeled ``Enron accounting 1A'' because what this resolution does now is to move that $2.2 billion back to fiscal 2003. So you have to play the shell game when they are looking at what happened in 2003, slip the money into the fiscal 2004 budget, and then when people take their eyes off 2003 and now focus on 2004, then you slip the same money into 2003. Great gimmick. It technically works, but if the SEC were supervising this, I think they would have the same kind of questions about our bookkeeping that we have had about Enron. So that is just one of the creative accounting measures that the committee has been reduced to following. I see the gentleman smiling. He knows what I am talking about. Mr. Speaker, I yield 7 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Florida and I are personal friends. And I take some pride in the fact that although this institution has become incredibly political over the last 15 years, and although it has become incredibly partisan, I take some pride in the fact that our friendship has withstood the context in which that friendship operates every day. I think, frankly, that the unreal demands on the part of the power centers in this institution have put greater strains on our friendship than is the case with any other chair and ranking member in the House, and yet we remain good friends. Because I know that the gentleman is trying to do his duty, and I think he understands that I am trying to do mine, and I think we genuinely like each other and respect each other. But he is given the job of bringing some of the saddest pieces of legislation to this floor of anyone in the House, simply because he is denied the resources to meet our responsibilities to the citizens we represent. We had $6 trillion in surpluses when the majority party 2 years ago started passing out its tax cuts. We are now facing $2 trillion to $3 trillion in deficits over that same time frame. And on top of that, we are going to have to pay for Iraq, which will add a whole lot more than the $87 billion that we have been told about so far. And so in a rational world, one would think that when conditions change to that degree, assumptions would also change and conduct would change, and we might reconsider some of our past decisions. But that is evidently not going to occur, so we are still going to continue to pretend that we can afford these huge tax cuts that have been passed out to high-income people in this country. This Congress faces a very simple choice: What kind of country do we want America to be? Are we satisfied with the prospect of having a country which in 10 years will have 50 million people without health insurance, rather than 40? Are we satisfied with the pretensions that we provide equal opportunity for education, when in fact we do not? Are we satisfied with the meager enforcement that protects private pension systems and that protects and enforces honest accounting by corporations so that investors can know what the rules of the game really are? Are we satisfied facing the long-term shortfalls that will occur in Social Security? I am not satisfied with that prospect, and I do not think most Members of this institution are either. If that is the case, we need to act like it, and we need to have a reconsideration of what the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) correctly calls the most colossally, fiscally irresponsible actions on the part of any administration certainly in my lifetime. Mr. Speaker, having said that, I would simply urge Members for the time being to support this continuing resolution to give the Committee on Appropriations more time to perform its impossible responsibilities, and in hopes that eventually the majority leadership of this House will see the necessity to reconsider some of its most reckless fiscal actions. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.