Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Chairman, I forgot, but I want to state here and now that I have the greatest respect for the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula) and certainly the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young). And I know that the gentleman from Ohio, as chairman of this subcommittee, if more money would have been available, would have put the money in the right places. His heart is in the right place. I understand that. My problem is that the policy of the majority party has prevented Chairman Regula from being Chairman Regula. The problem is that we are told as a result of the tax cuts that we can somehow afford $2 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, over 40 percent of which are targeted at the wealthiest 1 percent of the people in this country, but somehow we cannot afford $3 billion, not trillion, but $3 billion more to educate our kids, or $3 billion more to help see to it that kids do not lose their health coverage in a time of national economic problems. I think that is a sad, sad commentary on the priorities of this Congress. Mr. Chairman, I yield 6 minutes to the distinguished minority whip, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer). (Mr. HOYER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I take this time to speak out of order so that the gentleman from Florida and I might be allowed to explain a procedural matter before the House. Mr. Speaker, it is important that Members who were not on the floor for an earlier discussion not be mouse-trapped on the coming vote. I think it is important for them to understand the following, and I want to ask the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ney) whether this is correct. It is my understanding that a vote for the rule on the legislative branch appropriations bill will enable Members to express their desire that the previous provision which was discussed on the floor in the earlier vote, which would have had the effect of expanding dental care for Members of Congress and our staffs, will be eliminated from that bill. So if Members want to be on record opposed to that proposition, they will need to vote ``yes'' on the rule. I would ask the gentleman from Florida if that understanding is correct.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for that explanation.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the indulgence of the House at this late hour. I yield once more to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, the point is simply that it is up to Members how they want to vote, but if Members want to be on record opposed to that expansion under these provisions, they would vote ``aye'' for the rule.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for those comments. I would simply point out that as was pointed out on both sides of the aisle, the issue was not whether our staff should have those benefits or that we should have those benefits; I want every American to have those benefits. The issue is whether or not that provision should be slipped into this bill without the knowledge of the Committee on Appropriations on either side of the aisle, without any single Member of this House, except the Member who just spoke, knowing about it, evidently. We simply did not want Members to wake up after they have voted for this bill to find out that they were going to be subjected to a 30-second TV spot because something had been slipped into the bill. Not a single reference was made in the budget justifications to this item. So the point that the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) and I were making is not that this benefit should not be provided. It should not be provided without Members of Congress knowing what it is they are voting on, and it should not be provided without open, public debate.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OBEY. If Members want to assure this provision is not in the bill, and if they want to be on record voting against any possibility that this will happen under this bill, they will vote for the rule.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, continuing my reservation, I thank the gentleman. I just want to clear up one procedural question. I think Members need to know which action will adopt the language which strikes this from the bill. Will it be the adoption of the rule, or the passage of an amendment after the bill is under consideration?

Mr. OBEY. Further reserving the right to object, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Kingston).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, further reserving the right to object, I thank the gentleman for that explanation. Mr. Speaker, I want to make it clear I do not oppose any member of this society being able to have dental coverage or vision coverage under their insurance program. I would be very happy if my employees had it. I think all employees ought to have that coverage. I think all Americans ought to have that coverage. So I do not want this language to be misinterpreted as meaning that we are opposed to the idea. I think what we are all opposed to is the idea that this bill would slip this into law without having an open public debate about it so that it can be honestly dealt with and above-board in open-door sunlight fashion. And I would like to yield to the gentleman again to comment on this. I would like him to explain to the House exactly what the process will be so that every Member can be confident that they know what they are doing when they vote on both the rule and the bill.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, further reserving the right to object, I would simply like to make one correction. My understanding is that it is not actually the language in the bill which provides this. My understanding is that the key language was contained in the budget of the Chief Administrative Officer, which is financed by this bill. So we actually have to go to that document in order to discover the offending language.

Mr. OBEY. Reserving the right to object, Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) to explain the impact of this amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Further reserving the right to object, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments and his assurance. I know he is an honorable man, and I know that he would not have sneaked anything like this through. I want to know who did this, but I do not want it passed off to some low-ranking staffer in this place. Somebody got an order from somebody to do it, and every last Member of this House has a right to know who gave that order. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I originally had intended to vote for this resolution and this bill, but then about an hour ago my staff brought it to my attention something which they discovered about this bill. Buried in the bill, in fact, not in the bill at all, but in the budget for the House Administrative Office, is a $750,000 item that would begin to provide expanded dental care for Members of Congress and their staff July 4 of next year. No Member on this side of the aisle, to my knowledge, knew anything about it, and no member of our staff knew anything about it. I am only the senior Democrat on the Committee on Appropriations, and yet I did not know that that provision was at all tied into this bill. So we called the majority staff and asked about it, and they told us that they did not know anything about it. I believe the person that my staff talked to on the majority side, but I do not know what that means in terms of who put that provision in the bill. I assume the tooth fairy. But somebody did. And until that provision is removed or until we have an assurance that it is going to be removed, and I understand that the majority is going to remove it, nobody on this side of the aisle intends to vote for this rule or the accompanying bill. I happen not to have any objection to the idea that we provide dental coverage for every American in this country, but it was only 1 week ago when this Congress chiseled on Medicare benefits and chiseled on prescription drug benefits for retired seniors in this country, and for us to then find out that somebody has the bright idea that while we are chiseling on benefits for everybody else in this society, we are going to have an expanded medical benefit for Members of Congress is more than I am going to swallow. And I want to say something else. I am tired of people in Congress who want to provide benefits for themselves who will not provide those same benefits for the people we represent. I will never forget the experience I had last year when I went to a town named Antigo to open a small dental clinic for low-income people, and there I met a young woman whose husband had been sick for months. I think he had MS, but I am not sure. And she told me that there had been about 67 dentists in that four-county area. Only half of them would take Medicaid patients because of the low reimbursement rates. She told she went to every single one of those dentists trying to get some help to have the braces taken off of the teeth of her oldest child; could not find a single dentist to do it. So she finally held the kid down while the father took the braces off with a pair of pliers. I have had a bellyful of Washington politicians who want to deny people like that the needed healthcare, and yet will countenance this kind of end run in this bill today. I do not know who knew about this, but, by God, somebody knew about it, and I do not believe it was anybody on our committee on either side of the aisle. But it is a disservice for whoever tried this. It is a disservice not just to the taxpayer, but to every single Member of this House on both sides of the aisle because those Members, after they voted for this bill, they would have found out that they had voted blindly for a bill which allowed this to happen, and the public would have been justifiably angry, and the Members would not have been to blame. So I am glad that this is going to be taken out, but I am mad as hell that this ever happened. And I know the gentleman from Florida had nothing to do with it, and I know his staff had nothing to do with it, but I wish to God whoever did would 'fess up.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot of rewriting of history in the last hour or so. I want to make one thing clear, if House Republicans had their way and if we had passed the bills which originally passed the House under Republican leadership the last 5 years, instead of increasing education funding by $19 billion over that 6-year period, we would have decreased it by $15 billion. That is the bottom line summary of the facts. Now, let me get to the problem with this rule. Over the last 2 years, Congress has provided more than $2 trillion in tax cuts; a huge percentage of those tax cuts have been targeted to the top 1 percent of earners in this country. The majority party has pretended that there are no consequences and no cost to those tax cuts. Well, there are. First of all, every single dollar is paid for with borrowed money. That means that for the fiscal year in which this bill is going to be effective, we will pay $26 billion more in interest. That makes no sense. For less than half of that, you could fix every appropriations bill that we are going to pass. Consequence number two of the trillions of dollars in tax cuts is that there is no money left on the table except table scraps to deal with the problems of Medicare, to deal with the problems of prescription drugs, and to deal with other needed investments. Of the 13 appropriations bills that will come before the House this year, this is the bill that contains most of the funds for those needed investments. And I think we need to take a look at what is happening to this bill because this is the bill that demonstrates where the chickens come home to roost because of the cost of the outlandish tax packages that this House has passed. Now, in order to get moderate Republican votes for the original budget resolution, the Republican majority in this House promised that they would provide significant funding for title I and special education in order to get the votes of those moderates. So they promised that they would raise that funding to a very high level. The problem is that for title I we have a bill today which is almost $400 million below that funding level. And for special education we have a bill which is $1.2 trillion, below the amount promised in the Republicans' own budget resolution. So it is apparent that what happened is that they could not afford both to pay for their tax cuts and keep their promises on education, so they are breaking their promises on education. Secondly, the President said when we passed No Child Left Behind, ``no more money until we reform the programs.'' So we reform the programs. I voted for those reforms. And guess what? The check is not in the mail. The money now is not coming. This bill is going to be $8 billion for education below the amount that was promised for the funding scheduled for No Child Left Behind. In addition, this bill contains a number of other problems. It brings the 5-year progress that we have had in doubling NIH to a halt. You ask the people who are going to contract cancer, Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's disease, MS, you ask them this year whether they think an $88,000 tax cut for a millionaire is more important than continuing our efforts to double again NIH medical research. I know the answer you will get because they are in my office every day begging for help. In addition to that problem, if you take a look at some of the other problems, this committee cuts LIHEAP, the low-income heating assistance program, by $200 million below the President's budget and below last year. It cuts 3 million congregate meals for senior citizens under the Old Americans Act. It adds 200,000 people to the backlog that the Social Security Agency will experience in trying to meet disability claims, for instance. And it comes up $400 million dollars short, well, I have already said $400 million short, in basic title I programs. The problem with this House and the problem with this rule is that if this rule is adopted, nobody in the House can fix the problems in the bill that I have just described because the rule locks us in to past decisions on tax cuts, and it says, ``Sorry, boys and girls, you cannot do a blessed thing about it except fiddle around the edges.'' So, Mr. Speaker, I am going to ask people to vote ``no'' on the previous question. If it goes down, I will offer two amendments, one would close the gap between No Child Left Behind and other education funding. It would raise $5 billion in additional funding for education for needed funds for health care, and I would offer a second amendment which would provide $2.9 billion in increases by increasing every State's share that they receive from the Federal Government under Medicaid so that we can guarantee that not a single poor child will be tossed off the Medicaid or SCHIP rolls in any State of the Union. The budget process has been managed in a way that is trying to hide the impact of those tax cuts on education, on health care, on workers. This amendment reestablishes those linkages for all to see. In a democracy, you should not hide from your choices. You should make them quite clear. What a vote for this rule will do is to lock in the decision that we have made to have our kids pay for tax cuts for millionaires. That is a lousy choice. Anybody who makes it ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I just want to correct something the gentleman just said. The fact is, going all the way back to 1978, there has never been a year when the Democratically controlled Congress provided a federal contribution for IDEA less than 7\1/2\ percent. In fact, in 1979 it was 12\1/2\ percent; in 1983, 9\1/2\ percent. The fact is everybody understands, this is the same Republican majority that tried to eliminate the Department of Education, that tried to shut the government down in order to force deep cuts in education. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting education increases in 5 out of the last 6 years, and now they are taking credit for the funding increases which the Democrats forced on them mostly during the Clinton years. I do not mind them rewriting history, but I certainly hope they do not expect us to believe it.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, could the gentleman provide us with the text of the motion? I think we know what he wants to do, but we do not have a copy. I would like to make certain that there is no inadvertent confusion.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, continuing my reservation, I presume that that will also allow us to reach a second agreement.