Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I object.

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

Mr. OBEY. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, let me simply say that I appreciate the gentleman's comments and would simply say this. I share the wonder that we can be in the process of planning to provide universal health care in Iraq and provide a lot of education reconstruction as well. I guess my view of it is this. If we are going to be bombing the devil out of a country, I suspect that we have a considerable moral obligation to the population afterwards to help repair the damage and to help repair the human misery. So I do not begrudge what we will be trying to do for the people of Iraq after this miserable war. What I do hope, however, is that we will be able to reduce and perhaps eliminate future tax cuts that are contemplated right now here at home so that we can in fact provide universal health care for the people at home; so that we can in fact provide some school construction in our own districts; and so that we can in fact modernize hospitals in our own country. I think that is the proper way to do it, and I appreciate the gentleman's comments.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, we have been told all day numerous times that we could not afford to provide the funding that we wanted for homeland security; yet the leadership of this House has insisted that we include over $3 billion in ``relief'' for the airlines. I just thought the body would be interested in this article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I want to read the first three paragraphs: ``A group of 30 retired Delta Airline executives told current management last winter that spending millions of dollars to insulate top executive pensions from potential bankruptcy claims was `morally wrong' and `unconscionable.' ``The group, which included two former No. 2 executives at the Atlanta company, also warned the move would hurt Delta's reputation, as well as its ability to seek Federal aid and uphold employee morale. ``Their warning came in a January 22 letter to Delta Chairman and Chief Executive Leo Mullin.'' Some of the retired executives decided to make the letter public after last week's formal disclosure by Delta that it spent $25.5 million in 2002 to start creating protected pension trusts for Mullin and 32 other top executives. Now, if this is not a spectacular idea or example of rip-off capitalism, I do not know what is. This is enough to give capitalism a bad name. Mr. Chairman, I would just suggest that before we are so anxious to provide the funding that the Republican leadership in this House insists that we provide to these companies, I would suggest that Members recognize that the story tells us that there ought to be a few more stringent conditions on the use of that money by those airlines. This kind of conduct is outrageous. It is an example of why 50 percent of Americans do not vote, because they do not think that their elected representatives will protect the interests of working people nearly as eagerly as they will protect the interests of the corporate elite of this country. Delta Airlines management should be ashamed of itself, and anybody who comes into a congressional office looking for a bailout after they are trying to protect these kinds of pensions should be thrown bodily out of congressional offices. Amendment No. 11 Offered by Mr. Nethercutt

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

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

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hinojosa).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield my remaining time to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I am told that I am asking permission to strike the last word.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Chairman, if you follow the logic of the last speaker, what you are saying is that we should provide in this bill $3.25 billion to the airline industry, which we do not owe, but that we should not provide the funds in the bill to reimburse the volunteers for services, for which we do owe. I find that that makes no sense whatsoever. The gentleman from New York (Mr. Walsh) is absolutely right. This is an obligation which government has. We should not blame the recipients, we should not blame the participants in this program for the screw-ups of the agency on their bookkeeping balances. The fact is that this is totally defensible at a time when we are trying to encourage volunteerism, at a time when we are trying to encourage a sense of self-sacrifice. It would be a strange message indeed to say that we are not going to meet our obligations to the volunteers under this program.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word, and I yield to the gentleman from Florida for a time request.

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

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. OBEY. Reserving the right to object, as I said earlier, we have over 40 amendments left to go. I understand this is an important amendment. We just had over an hour on an amendment from the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) that was considered important. If we provide 40 minutes' time for this amendment, I do not want the expectation to be that we will do that for every other amendment. I would hope that we understand that this is the last amendment we would ask significant time for, and Members can expect us to ask unanimous consent in order to hold each future amendment to considerably less time than this.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, in light of the recent colloquy, let me simply say that I am getting whiplash from trying to follow the lead of the majority party and the White House on the issue that was just under discussion. We had before us earlier in the week this bill to essentially pay for the first downpayment on the Iraq war. We were trying to get additional money in the bill for homeland security so that we could protect ourselves at home from the retaliation that was likely to come from that involvement in the war. The House Republican leadership would not see its way fit to allow us to even debate that amendment and come to a vote on the House floor; and yet they arbitrarily ordered the Committee on Appropriations to include the $3.5 billion bailout for the airline industry that was just discussed a moment ago. Then, after that happened, then the White House issued a statement saying that, in fact, the package before the House for airline bailout was too generous. I am having a little difficulty following the lead of the majority and the lead of the White House because they seem to be working at cross purposes, and I am further confounded by the fact that this House is willing to consider a huge expenditure of funds like this with no hearings and to have it dealt with by a committee that has no special understanding of the problem; and it seems to me that a much better way, well, it just seems to me that we ought to be asking a fundamental question. It seems to me we ought to be asking the question of whether or not we have a viable airline industry in this country. In my view, we have a bunch of let's-pretend capitalists who have to come to the government for a bailout every time something happens in the economy. Now, they are essential to our national welfare and to our economic well-being. So I think we obviously need to keep the airline industry functioning, but I do not know how many times an airline has to go bankrupt before it is bankrupt. I do not know how many times they have to come to the taxpayers for additional money before we decide that a better way is to simply regulate them as a necessary public utility or as a public utility providing necessary service to the country, and that is what I really believe in the long term we ought to do. But I also must protest the slap dash way that this issue has wound up on the appropriation bill because I find it quaint that the House Republican leadership would demand the House go one way while the White House seems to indicate it wants to go another way. It is pretty hard to follow that kind of leadership, and I admire the gentleman from Florida for being a good soldier and responding to the instructions of his leadership; but I would have a difficult time trying to explain this to any taxpayer, any of my constituents. I would just hope that in the future we can do a better job of managing a problem like this, and I wish we could get to discuss the fundamentals on this issue rather than simply throwing more money at the problem. We were told that we cannot throw more money at homeland security, and yet we are providing billions of dollars to the airline industry without doing one whit to help the employees of those same airlines. I find that quaint. It is always the corporate part of the industry that gets the attention of Congress; and the working stiff sort of gets left in the caboose, if I can change transportation modes.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, this is a sad day for me personally. Thirty-four years ago today, I was sworn in as a new Member of this body. I was inspired by the idea that this institution was supposed to represent. This institution is supposed to be the people's House. This institution, more than any other, is supposed to reflect the public will. This institution has been known through the years as the greatest parliamentary body in the world. Mr. Speaker, I think the rule that is bringing this crucial piece of legislation to the floor today represents a fundamental corruption of the democratic processes of this House and this country. I want to explain why. Mr. Speaker, this bill is a $70 billion bill to try to pay for the cost of a war which, it is hoped, will bring ``democracy'' to Iraq. Yet, democracy is being fundamentally denied on this House floor this morning. Now, we hear all of this meaningless blather about how this is an open rule and we can offer any amendment that is within the rules, but that obscures the truth. The truth is that this bill has been brought to the floor under a rule which allows this bill to avoid the rules of the House, and it does so in three fundamental ways. That enables the majority to bring a bill to the House floor which, among other things, will supplement the process by which our government intends to provide basic health care to 25 million Iraqis; our government plans to provide for the modernization of 6,000 schools in Iraq; and it plans to rebuild 100 hospitals in Iraq. I begrudge the President none of that in his efforts to win the hearts and minds of that country. However, this rule blocks our effort to provide $2.5 billion in additional homeland security protection by protecting our ports, giving our first responders more assistance, and doing a variety of other things to keep this country safe from terrorist attack. The way it does that is that it allows the bill itself, brought by the Republican majority, to obliterate the normal rules of the House under which bills are considered; but then it requires us to abide by the very rules that the majority party ignores in constructing its bill. Members may call that democracy; I call it a sham. I call it a shameful sham. I do not for a moment understand why we are even having this disagreement. On a subject like homeland security there should be no ``Ds'' behind our name, there should be no ``Rs'' behind our name; there should only be an ``A'' after our name. In discussing a bill like this, we should not be Democrats or Republicans, we should be Americans. I would ask every Member of this House whether or not anything that we are trying to propose in this amendment is not worthy of support. We are being blocked today from funding a new program that would enable us to protect America from nuclear material loaded onto ships and brought into American ports. We are being denied the opportunity to install equipment in nine ports around the world so that for at least 50 percent of the cargo which comes into this country we will know it does not have nuclear material which could cause the explosion of dirty bombs in our ports and harbors. We are being denied the right to try to fix that problem. We are being denied the right to offer additional funds to protect the security of our own nuclear material here at home. We are being denied funds to upgrade the quality of State labs so they can detect what we are hit with if we are hit by a chemical attack. We are being denied $108 million to protect Federal dams and waterways from terrorist attacks. We are being denied $75 million so that we can conduct vulnerability assessments for chemical plants in this country. We are being denied several hundred million dollars in additional help that we want to provide to our local first responders, our police, and our firemen. Additionally, we are being denied an effort to provide additional funds so that our Guard and Reserve forces can see to it that in every State in the Union we have backup units to help first responders respond to chemical and biological attacks. We are being denied the ability to put additional port security requirements into effect in Charleston, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Baltimore, Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Corpus Christi, San Juan, and Wilmington in order to protect this country, again, from deadly material that is brought into our harbors. We are being denied many other things. So in my view, Mr. Speaker, this rule is a disgrace. We intend to vote against the previous question on the rule, and I would urge Members of the leadership of this House to recognize that on this, above all issues, we ought to be dealing with this in a bipartisan give-and-take manner so we can provide far more protection to each and every citizen of this country than we are providing to date.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, we have just heard a canard. The charge has been made by the Republicans for the last 3 days that there are $19 billion in unspent homeland security funds. Let me tell you how they get to that ridiculous statement. They count all of the money that is proposed for that program for the next fiscal year. We have not even passed that bill out of the Congress yet. That is 34 percent of that so-called $19 billion in unspent money. This supplemental contains another 10 percent. You cannot spend money in localities the Congress has not yet appropriated. That accounts for another 10 percent. Then the omnibus appropriations bill that was passed in February of this year, that accounts for the other 30 percent of that so-called $19 billion in unspent money. Only 2 weeks ago, the agency made available to States the ability to apply for that money. The application period has not even been closed. That leaves 26 percent left; and of that 26 percent left, only 4 percent has been unobligated. So let us keep the facts straight.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 11 minutes. Mr. Chairman, we have by the previous vote unfortunately short- circuited the democratic process in this House, and we have prevented us from having any really meaningful debate on this resolution today. Under the rule, we are going to be free to talk about providing additional money for homeland security. We just are not going to be able to put any amendments before the House that in any substantial way enhance homeland security, and I find that unfortunate. I think that there is much in this bill that is good, and I wanted to congratulate the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), the chairman of the committee, because he has done his constitutional duty and he has seen to it that the 200-year-long responsibility of the Congress to keep a tight leash on the public purse has been maintained, and I congratulate him for it. I know that there are a lot of people in this town who do not like that, but that was his responsibility. That was his committee's responsibility, and we lived up to it; and I think the House can be proud of that. I also think, frankly, that there are a couple of other occasions when Members of Congress wanted to unfairly intervene in executive prerogatives in this bill, and the committee correctly resisted those as well. So on that score I have no problem whatsoever with this bill. My problem is that I think it is a missed opportunity to provide additional protection for people at home. We are engaged in a war in Iraq. The idea of that war is to make the world safer for the United States and other democracies. And it would seem to me that if we are going to engage in a war against Iraq, we ought to be battening down the hatches to the fullest extent possible here at home to protect against terrorist attacks; but we have been denied the opportunity to offer our amendment to do so. And I want to walk through with the House what it is that they have rejected because I am going to try to offer it again anyway at a later point in the process. Perhaps the greatest challenge we face in dealing with terrorism is to monitor the more than 20,000 shipping containers that enter the United States each day. In our amendment, which we will seek to offer even though the rules sought to deny us, we tried to put $135 million in this bill so that we can institute at nine major ports around the world a system which we have now in the port of Rotterdam, which would enable us to install equipment so that we know that none of the containers in the 10 major ports in the world contain radioactive material which could be used to set off a dirty bomb within the United States. We think the House ought to support that. We also want to put $87 million in this bill to strengthen our ability to deal with nuclear material which is stored right here in the United States. We want to provide $150 million to strengthen the capacity of State laboratories and EPA laboratories to deal with the aftermath of a chemical attack. We are better equipped to deal with a biological attack in the country at this point than we are to deal with a chemical attack. We wanted to put sufficient funds into this bill so that we can take the vulnerability assessment that was done on Federal dams and waterways throughout the country and in fact act on that assessment and actually provide for the security upgrades that we need for those facilities. We need $108 million to do that. Only weeks ago, the General Accounting Office completed a report indicating that there is a serious threat posed by the possibility of terrorists targeting U.S. chemical plants. We wanted to provide $75 million to initiate an assessment of that threat as recommended by the GAO. We have been denied the opportunity to do that. We also want to see to it that there is better coordination between the FDA and the USDA in determining what kinds of inspections have taken place and what inspections have not taken place with respect to a number of shipments of agricultural products and medical products that come into this country. The Hart-Rudman report recommended the Federal Government provide funding to first responders to immediately clear the backlog of requests for protective gear for our local first responders. This legislation does not begin to lay a glove on the size of that problem. We also have a problem in that the equipment used by our firemen and our policemen and our rescue workers at the local level are not interoperable, and so those groups cannot talk to each other. Twenty years ago in this town when we had the Air Florida accident, we had rescue workers from Virginia, from Maryland, from the District of Columbia. They could not talk to each other on their emergency equipment because they were all on different wavelengths. That was 20 years ago. When we had that same problem at the Pentagon just about a year ago, we still had not improved the situation. No real progress in 20 years. It is about time we fix it. We want to in our amendment. We have been denied the opportunity. We also wanted to provide $300 million in additional funding to the Office of Domestic Preparedness, which has been denied. We also wanted to provide sufficient funds to guarantee that every State in the Union has at least one National Guard Civil Support Team to back up first responders in case of terrorist attack emergencies. We have been denied the opportunity to do that. We wanted to provide $90 million to expand port and waterway safety systems. Right now the port of Norfolk has a sophisticated system and the port of San Diego is going to get that system later in the year; but we still have ports like Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Baltimore, Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Corpus Christie, San Juan, and Washington, D.C. where we need that equipment, but do not have it. The Coast Guard indicates that in addition to all of that we have at least $900 million in needs that we ought to be helping local port authorities with and over the next 10 years those needs are estimated to be about $4.4 billion. We wanted to add $250 million to the 440 already in this bill to deal with that problem, and we have been denied that opportunity. And we also take note of the fact that the Pentagon has identified more than $1 billion of unfunded security needs at military bases here at home, such as providing additional protection for family housing by building perimeter fencing. Our amendment wanted to put at least $200 million in here for that purpose. We have been denied the right to do so. We wanted to increase the intelligence budget for the Department of Energy so that they can have a better surveillance operation with respect to countries like Iran and North Korea. We have been denied that opportunity. And we wanted to do a number of other things which I do not have time to discuss. Let me simply say, despite the fact that the rule has denied us the opportunity to offer the amendment, I am going to attempt to offer that amendment anyway when we get to the 5-minute rule because I believe that this is so important for the security of this country. There is no reason for us to have a dispute on this issue. There is no reason to have a difference between Republicans and Democrats on a national security issue of this magnitude. I cannot believe that we do not have bipartisan support for this added money. We found enough room to give $3 billion and more to the airlines, but not enough to provide $2.5 billion for homeland security. We find enough room in this bill to provide $7 billion in foreign aid to other countries including some bribe money to countries that voted with us in the United Nations who are adding virtually nothing to our security effort; and yet we are being denied the opportunity to provide $1 billion on the homeland security front. For that matter we know that our government policy is, and this is in writing, to provide health care, basic universal health care was the term, for 25 million people in Iraq. We know that our government intends to repair 6,000 schools and 100 hospitals in Iraq. It would be nice if we could do the same thing here at home. We are not, obviously, being allowed to do that because of the majority party's lust for passing every tax cut known to man, but that is a debate for another day. Today, as far as I am concerned, the critical hole in this bill is lack of sufficient funds for homeland security. We are going to try to do everything we can to fix that problem despite the lack of cooperation from the majority leadership. But I do want to, at the same time, thank the chairman of the committee for his personal cooperation in trying to make sure that this House at least met its constitutional responsibilities with respect to the power of the purse, and I congratulate him for that action.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards).

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I would like to propound a question to the distinguished chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. As I review the number of amendments pending, I see 39 remaining amendments on the Democratic side of the aisle and 6 on the Republican side of the aisle. As I calculate the clock, that means that if all of those amendments are only debated for 5 minutes per side, without counting the time for roll calls, that we would be here until midnight. If we then have actual votes on those amendments, I calculate that that would take us till at least 2 a.m. or 3 a.m.. If we have an additional 5 minutes per side or debate on half of those amendments, that would take us until about 5 o'clock in the morning. And if we have no time agreements on these amendments, we will be here at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. That is the reality of the clock that faces us. So I want Members to understand why it is that we are going to be seeking time agreements. Because if we do not, and the leadership has said we were not going to be here tomorrow, which means we may not start a session tomorrow but we are certainly going to be here tomorrow approaching noon unless we get time agreements on these amendments. So I just wanted to put the House on notice that the gentleman and I are trying to reach an understanding on time limits and we need those time limits to be as tight as is reasonably possible, or else Members are going to be spending an awful lot of time tonight with each other when they would rather be spending that time with somebody else.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Florida for whatever comments he may wish to make.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman, and I would just ask Members to be understanding of the time problem that we face and to recognize that we have to ask them to agree to tight time limits or we are going to be here until the cows come home.