Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I understand what the gentleman is doing. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, let me confirm that I think this bill will be supported broadly on both sides of the aisle, and I would simply like to bring three matters to the attention of the House. First of all, I really do believe that this institution is going to have to take a look at the number of commitments that we have worldwide and compare that to the strain that we have on the available troops for use under these many commitments. I think anyone who looks at the situation will understand that we are dangerously close to having an overextended military; and I think we ought to ask ourselves honestly if we are going to engage in these many commitments around the world, do we need to have a larger Army. In my view if we are, then we do. If we do not intend to enlarge the Army, then I think we must be much more aggressive in asking our allies to help us deal with some of the peacekeeping functions that we face, for instance, in Iraq. Secondly, I do have some misgivings about the funding levels for SDI in the bill. Thirdly, I want to talk about something that I think is more important than any of those considerations. This Subcommittee of Defense is perhaps the most bipartisan of all appropriations subcommittees, and the Committee on Appropriations is probably the most bipartisan committee in the House; and it is in that spirit that I raise a matter that I think every Member should be aware of because of its deadly importance. It involves intelligence, specifically the intelligence gathering and analysis used in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. What I am going to say is based on published reports purportedly based on interviews with intelligence officials and military officers. Neither I, nor I suspect anyone in the House of Representatives, knows the extent to which these reports are accurate so there is no possibility of disclosing classified material. We have had the staff of the committee look at the allegations on a bipartisan basis, and I think it is fair to say, while they do not have enough information to reach specific conclusions, they do find much of what has been said in these stories to be credible. In addition to the CIA, which is an independent agency, there are four major intelligence organizations inside the Department of Defense. All of these entities are funded in this bill. The press stories I am referring to, and I would be glad to provide copies of them to any Member who is interested, those stories argue that a group of civilian employees in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, all of whom are political employees, have long been dissatisfied with the information produced by the established intelligence agencies both inside and outside the Department. That was particularly true, apparently, with respect to the situation in Iraq. As a result, it is reported that they established a special operation within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which was named the Office of Special Plans. That office was charged with collecting, vetting, and disseminating intelligence completely outside the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that the information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with the established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the President without having been vetted with anyone other than OSD political appointees. It is further alleged that the purpose of this operation was not only to produce intelligence more in keeping with the preheld views of those individuals, but to intimidate analysts in the established intelligence organizations to produce information that was more supportive of policy decisions which they had already decided to propose. There is considerable discussion regarding the intelligence relating to weapons of mass destruction. I think it would be unfortunate if this issue were subsumed by the question of whether or not Saddam Hussein had such weapons. First of all, we do not know at this point. My personal suspicion has always been that he did. Secondly, measuring the quality of our intelligence apparatus requires more than determining whether the reporting was right or wrong on any single issue. Is what was reported consistent with the best information that was available? Did we reach the right conclusion based on good information or by happenstance? These allegations, however, go well beyond the issue of WMDs. It appears that the individuals in question also challenged the consensus within the intelligence community on the number of troops that would be required for a successful invasion. The political appointees within the Office of the Secretary maintained regular contact with sources within the Iraqi National Congress, who in turn maintained contact with sources inside of Iraq.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, based on information transmitted by these sources, the political appointees argued that the conclusions of the intelligence community, the Joint Chiefs, and in particular General Shinseki, were in error and the invasion could be successfully carried out with fewer than 50,000 troops. While the chiefs in the end got most of the troops that they requested, it appears that the invasion was both lighter than they would have desired and lighter than what was required. The inability to fully protect supply lines did in fact result in the loss of life. The shortage of available personnel did leave certain critical sites such as nuclear facilities unprotected. We all know this is incredibly serious business. It is important not only to understand what we did or did not do with respect to Iraq, but it is far more important in terms of what we will do in the future. How will the information that the President and the Congress receive on our options in Korea be put together, for instance? Will the long- established collection mechanisms, evaluation and dissemination be used, or will we again fall back on the ad hoc efforts of this self- appointed group of experts? It is important to note that these same individuals have established a new office with an Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. This office will have more than 100 people, and it is widely believed in the intelligence community that the office is being created for the express purpose of pressuring analysts to produce information more supportive of predetermined policy. I do not know if that is true or not, but the question remains, Will this office stand between our war fighters and the information they need? Why did they require this small group of civilians to employ this kind of a role? Will the Under Secretary compete with the Director of Central Intelligence in the coordination of these agencies? All I can say is that we are paying for all of this. We ought to have the answers. I would like to ask Members to remember that there was a reason the National Security Act of 1946 placed all intelligence activities under the control of one man, the Director of Central Intelligence. General Hoyt Vandenberg, who himself served as the DCI, explained that decision in testimony before Congress. He said, ``The joint congressional committee to investigate the Pearl Harbor attack found failures that went to the very structure of our intelligence organizations, a failure to coordinate the collection and dissemination of intelligence, and the failure to centralize intelligence functions of common concern to more than one department of the government which could more efficiently be performed centrally.'' I think we need to remember those words, and I think the Congress needs to dig and dig hard to get to the bottom of this. I do not, frankly, know what the right structure for gathering and dissemination of intelligence information ought to be, but I am very leery of the fact that we have a new operation which can deal with information without clearing it with anyone else. The reason the system has served us so well over the past years is because all information has been vetted with other people who are supposed to know the most about it. I think it is dangerous when we get away from that practice. Amendment Offered by Mr. Lewis of California

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe this bill is here, and I want to make clear that while I certainly do not object to the effort to insulate Federal employees from negative retirement actions, if there is a rollcall on this bill, I would vote ``no.'' And the reason is because I think this bill demonstrates a rampant double standard. As I understand it, last week in the prescription drug bill debate that we had on this floor, the majority party in essence told seniors, ``Have we got a deal for you. We are going to set it up so that you are going to be able to get the same benefits as your Member of Congress.'' And now what are you saying this week? You are bringing a bill up that says to your future retiring Member of Congress, ``Have we got a deal for you. It is going to be a special deal. You are going to be able to make sure that when you retire, you will have better prescription drug benefits than that poor sucker on Medicare.'' That is what you are telling people, and I do not happen to think that is a very straightforward way to deal with our constituents. I understand what the committee wants to do to protect Federal employees. I would be very happy to vote for this bill once the majority party brings back to this floor a decent deal on prescription drugs for every other American, but not under these circumstances, not under these circumstances. Right now, if you are a Federal employee, if you are a Member of Congress, if you belong to the Blue Cross plan, you get 80 percent of your cost paid for for prescription drugs basically. But what do you say to seniors under that turkey of a prescription drug bill you passed last week? What you say is, oh, we will help you pay up to $2,000, but, boy, if you get stuck with drug costs that are somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000, for that $3,000 hit on your wallet, sorry, you are not going to get any help from Uncle Sam. And my colleagues think that is a square deal? I mean, with all due respect to the effort behind this bill, it does not meet the laugh test, as far as I am concerned. If the majority party in this House wants to be considered a serious legislative force on this issue, they will pull this bill from the floor and bring it back when they can also bring back to the floor a bill with a decent, sustainable, consistent, reliable, affordable benefit under Medicare for all seniors for prescription drug costs. Until that happens, do not ask me to vote for a special insider deal for Members of Congress. That is what this bill does.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, what has been happening in this House is that the Committee on Rules has routinely been waiving points of orders for the majority but denying those same waivers to the minority. That puts us in an uneven position on the House floor. We are in that kind of position on this amendment. I want to simply say in conceding the point of order that I will continue to make this motion on this bill. I will have it in my motion to recommit. I will try at every stage of the process to get this matter before the House so we can make these priority judgments, and it is up to the majority whether it wants to knock them off the floor or not.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I will not take the 5 minutes. This is simply the same motion I offered before. If this House were operating on the basis of any degree of fairness today, it would be before the House, and I would simply ask that the majority refrain from offering the point of order against it. I know they have their marching orders. They have to do what they have to do, and I have to do what I have to do. Point of Order

Mr. OBEY. Without the motion to recommit, yes.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I want to express my agreement with the comments made by the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), the distinguished chairman of this committee. And then I want to say this: Budgets are not just presentations of numbers. Budgets really reflect and define and exhibit our priorities and our values. And that is why this bill is such a sad commentary on the nature of this House. When President Bush came into office, thanks to the fiscal discipline demonstrated by the previous administration, we expected to see at least $6 trillion worth of surpluses over the next decade. We were in the best shape that we had been fiscally in more than a generation. So the President decided that we could afford to provide very large tax cuts, and he estimated we would still have billions left over for other purposes, and the House passed those tax cuts. My point is that then something happened that was totally unexpected. We got hit by 9/11 and the economic downturn that followed that. Any person of prudence in my view, having seen such a shocking change, would have been careful about the next step that they took, but this Congress and this White House, alas, was not. So despite the fact that the bottom was falling out of the economy and the bottom was falling out of Government revenues, the White House and this Congress decided they were going to push on with even larger tax cuts. They said that we needed to do it in order to create jobs. But, not a single job has been created during the tenure of the Bush administration. In fact, we have lost almost 3 million jobs since President Bush took office. Part of that is not his responsibility; part of it in my view is, and the Congress's as well. My point is that when conditions change one would think that their approach and their remedies change, but they have not. We have gotten only one answer out of the administration in terms of dealing with the economy: Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, no matter how badly they are skewed to the upper reaches of the income ladders and no matter what they cost to the other people in this society. And this bill is one of the examples of what it costs. When this House passes these tax cuts, it pretends that there is no cost to anyone else. Let me just spell out what some of the costs are. Those tax cuts mean that we will be paying $23 billion more in interest payments next year than we would otherwise be paying. Before these tax cuts play out we will be spending more on interest payments in the Federal budget than we will be spending on all domestic appropriation items reported by this committee, and it will be a gargantuan share of the Federal budget. We ought to be able to make better judgments than that. But there are other costs as well. We passed the ``No Child Left Behind Act'' for education, sent mandates out to the States and said we would send cash out to help pay for those mandates. I've news for you, the appropriations bill that is going to come out will short sheet those education programs by $8 billion. Nobody knows that, but that is what is going to happen. And this is happening at a time when budget crunches all over the country are going to be squeezing States and squeezing schools. We are also having to squeeze down on what we provide in health care. There are thousands and thousands of families being pushed off health care in many States in the Union. And this bill represents what is going to happen to military families, because we are cutting $1.5 billion below the deliverable amount in the previous year's budget for military families under military construction. And we wind up making only token progress in improving the housing for military families and for single enlisted people. The cost of the estate tax elimination, which this House just passed: For the cost of that money it took to take millionaires off the tax roll when we passed that estate tax change--that is going to cost $800 billion--for that $800 billion, we could close one-third of the gap in financing that will be existing in the Social Security system. We should have done that first. But we did not. We passed another huge tax cut for the high rollers. So there are consequences, and there are costs to those tax cuts. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) is right. He cannot perform a miracle. Neither can the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg). Appropriations are the table scraps that are left over after this House has decided to plunge ahead, promising all of these out-sized tax cuts to the American people with a huge share of those tax cuts going to the most well off, and then we see what happens to the rest. So that is why I am not pleased with this bill, not because of the work of the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg) or the staff but because this House made a basic bad judgment to begin with and it is being compounded and illustrated and demonstrated with every other bill we bring to the floor. That is the problem. There are consequences. The budget process is being handled in this House to try to hide those consequences. It is our responsibility to try to lay out what those consequences are, and that is why we have gone through this operation this afternoon.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would like to be heard on the point of order.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I have already explained to the House what the intention of this amendment is. This amendment would reinstate the $160 million in cuts from the President's budget for hangers, maintenance shops, office space, physical fitness facilities for the military that even the White House thought were crucial. It adds $480 million for family housing to help at least 2,500 military families. There are 134,000 inadequate units that service those families to date. It would add $318 million for new barracks. It would help get 5,300 single service personnel into decent housing. The Pentagon says there is a need for over 83,000 unit fix-ups. And it would pay for that by reducing the expected tax cut for those with adjusted gross incomes of more than $1 million dollars annually. We would adjust their tax cuts from $88,000 to $83,000, thus enabling them to keep 95 percent of their tax cut. That would free up enough money to meet these military needs, and I would urge the House, despite the action of the Committee on Rules, to allow this amendment to go forward. Point of Order

Mr. OBEY. I am, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer a motion to recommit.

Mr. OBEY. Yes, I do, Mr. Speaker. As I said earlier, this is the same motion I made before. What is happening here is that because of a technical difference in the way the rules are being applied to the majority and the minority, we are being prevented from offering a motion which would strike a much better balance between the needs of our military and the needs of the most well-off people in this society. With that, I concede the point of order.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, it would be so nice if the force of our rhetoric is matched by the force of our deeds. That certainly is not the case with this bill. Just a few months ago this House passed this resolution and it said, among other things, ``Resolved by the House of Representatives, the Senate concurring, that the Congress express the unequivocal support and appreciation of the Nation to the members of the United States Armed Forces serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom who are carrying out their missions with excellence, patriotism and bravery and also to their families.'' Well, the sad news, unfortunately, is that the check is not in the mail. We have given them a resolution but we are short-sheeting them in terms of things that military families need in order to make their life better. I do not understand why we are doing that. This bill shows the House's ``support and appreciation'' by providing $1.5 billion less than we appropriated last year to provide the military with decent housing and work places. The bill also thanks the military supposedly by cutting the President's own request for the Pentagon by $180 million. This is for hangers, offices, fitness centers and teaching facilities that even OMB and the administration said the military needed. But this bill cuts them out. Many Members of this House have seen the problems for themselves. The Pentagon itself rates the readiness of most military facilities as marginal or worse. Over 225,000 service members and their families cannot get decent barracks or decent housing. This bill is not up to the job and we all know why. It is not the fault of the subcommittee chairman. It is the fault of every single Member of this House who voted for the budget resolution which said that the only priorities for this year was going to be tax cuts. And as you know, the lion's share of the tax cuts went into the pockets of the most wealthy 1 percent of people in this country. So as a result of that decision by the Republican leadership to put tax cuts as the primary goal of this Congress, the budget resolution, for instance, that was passed is on track to cut $28 billion from veterans benefits. There would be, under the White House budget, $200 million in cuts to impact aid to the school districts that educate the children of military families. As many as 230,000 military families have been cut out of the low income child tax provision. We are taking millionaires off the tax roll, but we are not giving the people who need the help the most anything but table scraps on the tax side. The defense bill, which was marked up this morning in full committee, will cut raises for the most junior enlisted and officer personnel from the 4.1 percent they have been expecting to just 2 percent. I want to see how many of you who have cried about the fact that you have Army personnel on food stamps, I want to see how many of you vote to cut that. I want to watch that. A realistic budget resolution has been beyond the reach of the Congress, and this is the result as we are seeing today. Now, I want to be able to offer an amendment to correct the problem. My amendment would reinstate the $160 million in cuts from the President's budget. I would like to restore all of them. I think the White House is right. We need them. I would also add $480 million for family housing. That would help at least 2,500 military families. That would be a useful first step in replacing the 134,000 inadequate units that service members and their families are forced to live in today. Finally, the amendment would provide $318 million for new barracks that would help 5,300 single service members into decent housing. The Pentagon says we need over 83,000 units, so even this amendment goes just an inch. My amendment is an opportunity to restore the projects the President said were needed, to help about 8,000 service members and their families, and it would help Congress to keep its promise to the troops. Now, as the gentleman from Massachusetts has indicated, I would pay for it by changing the tax package that was just passed by this Congress. What I would say is that for persons with adjusted gross incomes of more than $1 million, instead of their getting the $88,000 tax cut they will get next year, we would cut that to $83,000. That is hardly starvation wages. Now, these are not just millionaires. These are people with adjusted gross incomes of more than $1 million each year, about 200,000 people in this society. And I bet if you asked them, they would say they would happily take that reduction in order to provide a real improvement in the quality of life for our troops. We are saying let them keep 95 percent of their tax cut but use that $5,000 difference to give people who are putting their lives on the line for this country better living conditions. I do not know if you saw the article in the ``Army Times'' June 30, 2003. Mr. Speaker, I will insert this article in the Record immediately after my remarks. I would also like to read you two paragraphs from a news story today out of The New York Times. It reads as follows: ``The 400 wealthiest taxpayers who accounted for more than 1 percent of all income in the United States in the year 2000 more than doubled their share from 8 years earlier, but their tax burden plummeted over that same period of time.'' The article then goes on to say why, and then it says that ``had President Bush's latest tax cuts been in effect in 2000, the average tax bill for the top 400 earners in the country would have been about $30.4 million, a savings of $8.3 million, or more than a fifth.'' Now, when we are in tough times, we have to ask, in my judgment, who needs help the most. I think that decent military housing ought to come before $88,000 tax cuts for the most comfortable people in this society. We are not saying cut them out. We are simply saying shave them back by 5 percent. Our problem is, we will not even be able to offer this amendment on the floor today because the Committee on Rules said, ``No way, baby.'' So that means that once again, the Republican majority is able to hide behind its budget resolution which did not specify where the cuts would come from in order to pay for the tax cuts. We have a serious problem in this House. The budget process is supposed to force the Congress to make choices, to recognize trade- offs, and explicitly make those choices in full view of the country. Instead, the budget process is being used in conjunction with the rules out of the Committee on Rules to deny the public the understanding of what the costs are from those tax cuts. So they get to think that they are cost-free. They do not know, for instance, that they will cost the public an extra $27 billion in interest payments next year. If we could take just $10 billion of that extra interest payment, we could take care of the shortcomings in education, in health care, in military housing, and every other appropriation bill that comes before us. That is what we would do if we had any sense of common sense. That is what we would do if we had any sense of justice. I urge you to vote against the previous question on the rule so that we can offer the amendment that I have just described. [From the Army Times, June 30, 2003] Nothing but Lip Service In recent months, President Bush and the Republican- controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap--and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately. For example, the White House griped that various pay-and- benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary--including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty. This comes at a time when Americans continue to die in Iraq at a rate of about one a day. Similarly, the administration announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones. Then there's military tax relief--or the lack thereof. As Bush and Republican leaders in Congress preach the mantra of tax cuts, they can't seem to find time to make progress on minor tax provisions that would be a boon to military homeowners, reservists who travel long distances for training and parents deployed to combat zones, among others. Incredibly, one of those tax provisions--easing residency rules for service members to qualify for capital-gains exemptions when selling a home--has been a homeless orphan in the corridors of power for more than five years now. The chintz even extends to basic pay. While Bush's proposed 2004 defense budget would continue higher targeted raises for some ranks, he also proposed capping raises for E-1s, E-2s and O-1s at 2 percent, well below the average raise of 4.1 percent. The Senate version of the defense bill rejects that idea, and would provide minimum 3.7 percent raises for all and higher targeted hikes for some. But the House version of the bill goes along with Bush, making this an issue still to be hashed out in upcoming negotiations. All of which brings us to the latest indignity--Bush's $9.2 billion military construction request for 2004, which was set a full $1.5 billion below this year's budget on the expectation that Congress, as has become tradition in recent years, would add funding as it drafted the construction appropriations bill. But Bush's tax cuts have left little elbow room in the 2004 federal budget that is taking shape, and the squeeze is on across the board. The result: Not only has the House Appropriations military construction panel accepted Bush's proposed $1.5 billion cut, it voted to reduce construction spending by an additional $41 million next year. Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, took a stab at restoring $1 billion of the $1.5 billion cut in Bush's construction budget. He proposed to cover that cost by trimming recent tax cuts for the roughly 200,000 Americans who earn more than $1 million a year. Instead of a tax break of $88,300, they would receive $83,500. The Republican majority on the construction appropriations panel quickly shot Obey down. And so the outlook for making progress next year in tackling the huge backlog of work that needs to be done on crumbling military housing and other facilities is bleak at best. Taken piecemeal, all these corner-cutting moves might be viewed as mere flesh wounds. But even flesh wounds are fatal if you suffer enough of them. It adds up to a troubling pattern that eventually will hurt morale--especially if the current breakneck operations tempo also rolls on unchecked and the tense situations in Iraq and Afghanistan do not ease. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Texas, who notes that the House passed a resolution in March pledging ``unequivocal support'' to service members and their families, puts it this way: ``American military men and women don't deserve to be saluted with our words and insulted by our actions.'' Translation: Money talks--and we all know what walks.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would also reserve a point of order on the amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would simply agree with the point of order lodged by the gentleman. I do not happen to have much of a problem with the substance; but it seems to me that if the rules are to be applied around here, they ought to be applied to everybody on both sides of the aisle.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman who is offering this amendment has just said that what he is doing is to apply to existing law with respect to the Immigration Act as a new set of sanctions. And what that means is that none of the funds provided in this bill can go to any locality that is violating that law which means they get no fire grants, they get no port security money, they get no money for their Office of Domestic Preparedness. It applies to FEMA. How many of you want to have a disaster and find out because of some technicality your State is not eligible for any money? How would you like that if it happened to fire funds, for instance? So I would say that it is very clear, you are making a very big change in what localities can receive under this bill. Now, State and localities are already being short-changed and should have received far more than they did in the tax bill because of their budget crunch. This will simply add to their woes and will do so inadvertently if they were simply in violation because of a technicality. It is obvious to me that we are going to have a vote on this bill. As far as I am concerned, we might as well get on with the vote and get out of here.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, on that I most reluctantly and respectfully move to appeal the ruling of the Chair.

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

Mr. OBEY. Well then, Mr. Chairman, I would simply say that I would urge the Chair to uphold my right to offer this amendment, because I cannot believe that the majority leadership would want to be so unfair as to waive provisions of our rules for the majority party's bill, but to not extend the same opportunity to those of us on the minority side, and to point out that I have just recited four instances where, just a few months ago, the majority leadership insisted that we provide these waivers for these nonappropriated purposes.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, this amendment attempts to do six things. It would add $400 million for port facility security grants. The Coast Guard says that we need more than $4.5 billion over time to secure those operations. At the committee rate of only an additional $100 million per year, it would take 20 years for us to get halfway to the task that is defined for us by the Coast Guard. I do not think that is fast enough. We would also add $100 million for the Coast Guard to implement the Maritime Transportation Security Act, which passed this Congress last November, which is aimed at strengthening our ability to analyze vessel threat information. We need simply look at the newspaper headlines yesterday about explosives bound for Sudan that were picked up by the Greek government, 680 tons of explosives and 8,000 detonators in the ship Baltic Sky, which the inspectors described as being tantamount to the power of an atomic bomb. I think that makes eminently clear why we need to protect our own ports to a greater extent. Thirdly, we would add $100 million to increase the inspections of containers that are being shipped to this country. Right now we inspect only 2 percent. We would add 1,300 more inspectors. We are just scratching the surface in terms of what we need. Fourth, we would add $200 million to improve northern border security. That border is 5,500 miles long. It is highly vulnerable. I referred earlier to the some 60 aircraft that flew across that border unannounced and unflagged over the past year. We would then add $150 million for aviation security to secure airport perimeters and to strengthen our ability to screen cargo on passenger planes. It is kind of strange to provide screening for passengers if we do not provide it for cargo. Lastly, we would add $50 million for the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Division in the new agency that is supposed to be the nerve center, the brain, of that agency in targeting what our biggest vulnerabilities are. We would pay for that by reducing the size of the tax cut that was passed by this Congress. We would reduce the size of the tax cut for taxpayers who earn more than $1 million a year. They are scheduled to get an $88,000 tax cut. We would reduce that tax cut to $83,000. So instead of getting $17.7 billion next year, they would only get $16.6 billion in tax reduction. I hardly think that is laying a scratch on them. Mr. Chairman, the purpose of the Budget Act was to try to force the Congress to recognize the choices and the trade-offs that are attendant to any budget. The problem is that the way the budget process has been used, we have a situation in which we have a huge disconnect between actions on the tax bill and the consequences that flow in terms of reduced services and reduced security for the country. So I would simply ask that we recognize that this amendment meets essential services. It provides essential services, and it also has the added feature of demonstrating that there is a price to pay for tax cuts primarily aimed at such high-income people, especially when it means and requires that by the time we finish our action on the tax side of the ledger, we have only table scraps left to provide needed services not just for homeland security for that matter but for education, health care, and a number of other crucial items. For those who say we are invading the jurisdiction of another committee, we did that at the expressed request of the House leadership just a few months ago on the omnibus appropriations bill. So this is nothing new, and I would urge support for the amendment, Mr. Chairman. Point of Order

Mr. OBEY. Because what I think the Chair just said is that the Committee on Rules, in contrast to the way it handled majority provisions, that the Committee on Rules did not make in order a waiver for our side of the aisle. But let me ask the Chair as a parliamentary inquiry, is it not correct that on the omnibus appropriations bill just a few months ago that we amended the Medicare Act not once, but in two separate areas, to provide a 6 percent increase in funding for providers under the Medicare Act, even though that was considered invading another committee's jurisdiction? Is it also not true that on that omnibus legislation the committee was allowed to increase payments under division N, section 401(b) of the Medicare Act for rural hospitals? Is it not true that we waived the rules to allow the U.S. Customs Service to conduct vehicle inspections on the Canadian side of the U.S.-Canada border? And is it not also true that during the tumultuous debate about what to do about the dilemma of the airlines, that we waived rules again to allow the committee to include in its appropriation bill the bailout for the airlines as well as the extension of unemployment benefits to those in that industry?