Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, continuing under my reservation, I would simply say that I think the gentleman has been totally open. I fully agree with that. The problem has not been him. The problem has been that while he has tried to keep the process open, we have been denied our fundamental right as a minority to even offer amendments to the products that your committee has produced, and then all of the deals are made behind closed doors. If anyone attended the conference two nights ago, one of our members asked Senator Stevens, he said, what is the process by which we are going to determine the outcome of the items that are still open in conference? And the response he got from the chairman of the conference was, the same process that was used to consider the items that are already closed. That process was simply a process in private where decisions were made by the majority. Now, in the end, the majority is going to win most of these; I understand that. But we have a right to have honest differences considered, and at least we have the right to have those honest differences addressed in full view of the public and the press so that the public can determine which argument has the better of it, but they have been denied this time and time again, and we are fed up. I am fed up with it. So I am going to, at every opportunity, take full advantage of whatever rights we have on the floor to try to see to it that we never have happen again in this institution this kind of nonsense because of the denial of the regular legislative process over the course of many months. So I most regretfully suggest, if the gentleman wants to extend a courtesy to the White House that the majority would not extend to its own Members and to us, then by all means, I am ready to consider that tomorrow, but not tonight. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman does not have any further questions, I regretfully object.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 10 seconds. Mr. Speaker, I must say, I am amused by the prior speech. I would simply observe with respect to title I, the Republican Party in this House had to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting the very funds which the gentleman so proudly now pointed to on his chart. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee). (Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I want to take this time, and so does the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha), in order to express the House's appreciation to Greg Dahlberg, who has served this institution so ably and for so long. For over 20 years he served on the Committee on Appropriations on the Subcommittee on Transportation, on the full committee central staff, and on the Subcommittee on Defense. Since 1994, he was a senior Democratic staffer for defense appropriations which covers virtually all of the military operations in the government. He was appointed Under Secretary of the Army the last 6 months of the Clinton administration. He volunteered to help the new administration get started, and stayed a few extra months. He has been a personal adviser and great friend to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) and myself. He has served over 200 Democratic members to help them understand defense issues and to deal with those issues in their districts. He has a deep concern for the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines deployed throughout the world. He loves this institution, and he has given help many times to both Democratic and Republican Members of this institution. In the defense world there are many opportunities for qualified staff to leave the Hill for more lucrative jobs. Greg has resisted that temptation for many years, and for that we are grateful. We certainly wish him well in his future endeavors. He has been the institutional memory of this House on the budget process and on defense intelligence. He is one of the finest, most dedicated public servants, and one of the most decent human beings I have ever had the privilege to work with.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 10 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I cannot ask people to vote against their bill because it does some things which any piece of legislation would do which came to the floor at this point. It does provide needed funds for Medicare. It does provide funding for a number of programs which, if we did not pass the bill, would be limited to last year's level; and that would cripple a good number of programs, including education. But before Members decide how they want to vote, I think they need to understand that this legislation is a god-awful mess brought to the floor by a god-awful process. About $360 billion, or 90 percent, of the $400 billion in spending contained in this bill, never came before the House of Representatives until it arrived in this one huge take-it-or-leave-it package today. That means 90 percent of the domestic budget involving hundreds of individual programs was never subjected to debate or amendment in the United States House of Representatives. What you have here, as I said earlier, is the biggest back-room deal in terms of spending in the Nation's history. And when you have a back- room deal which is not ever aired in public, that means a lot of people are going to get hurt, and a lot of people are going to get things that they should not get. And I want to walk through some examples. The most urgent need in this country is to ensure that we can track down and stop people who would commit acts of terror against our citizenry. This bill leaves huge gaps in our defenses. Once again, we are delaying the ability of funds that are required to protect American lives. I would say to everyone who would listen that this is not the fault of our good friend, the chairman of the committee; he has done his duty, and he understands the need for action in this area. But there are many others in this Chamber and there are some on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue who are not being helpful and who are blocking the resources that are critically needed at the moment. This Nation is in serious peril and here are some examples: The head of the Customs Service says we need to greatly beef up the inspections of cargo containers used in worldwide shipping. He and others have warned that these containers offer terrorists with significant opportunities to get bombs, chemicals, missiles and other dangerous weapons into this country. He has asked for $57 million right now to do that job, $57 million. This bill contains $12 million, less than 25 percent of what is needed. We have $392 million in spending for new courthouses in this bill, but the committee could not find the other $45 million to fully fund the container security initiative that was asked for by our own administration. In addition to the containers themselves, we have huge security issues with respect to ports. We have ships arriving in this country every day containing millions of gallons of highly flammable and toxic chemicals. They are bombs waiting to be detonated. The Coast Guard says the costs of upgrading security at these ports is $1 billion. This bill contains only $150 million or 15 percent of the amount that ought to be in the bill. Now, we have known since we saw the pictures of those brave police and fire fighters on September 11 that the next attack might put them in even more dangerous situations. Very few police departments have the equipment necessary to allow first responders to enter an area that has been hit by chemical, biological or radiological weapons. We have been trying to get that money out for more than a year, and we have hit roadblocks time after time after time. The White House is playing a flim-flam game with respect to this issue. A year ago, the President blocked the inclusion of significant first responder funds in the supplemental. Last summer, he vetoed first responder funds in the second supplemental. He has also refused since last October to release the first responder funds made available by the continuing resolutions. But he spends a lot of time going around the country being photographed with firemen and policemen and talking about the $3.5 billion in funds for first responders in his 2003 budget. He does not mention, however, where he got the bulk of the money to pay for that $3.5 billion increase. He got it by eliminating a series of ongoing programs that also provide grants to local policemen and firemen. That is like the boss offering to double your pay next month if you will agree to take no pay this month. It does not help a heck of a lot. This bill restores those basic cuts, but it does so by slashing the President's first responder initiative. When all grants to fire and police are combined, this conference report is $466 million below the President's request for first responders. For the first time, Congress will have a worse record on first responders than the White House, and that is outrageous. So I guess the answer is, let them use duct tape. There are deficiencies in other areas. The Department of Energy, the committee could not find $108 million identified last spring by the Army Corps of Engineers as being absolutely essential for physical security upgrades to waterway navigation and dams around the Nation. And none of the $254 million identified by the Secretary of Energy last spring as necessary to secure radioactive material, nuclear weapons and other highly toxic substances at U.S. nuclear weapons plants and laboratories is provided in this bill. Education is a mixed bag. Now, for the last 6 years, on average, we have been able to provide about a 14 percent increase in education. The good news in this bill is that we have been able in this bill to raise the funding for education above the real dollar freeze that the President presented, or 3 percent in nominal terms. This bill is about $3 billion above the President's for education. It means that we will have about a 10 percent increase. That is still a cut in the rate of increase that we have had for education on average over the last 6 years, but it is some progress and I am pleased to see it; but it is still funded at such limited levels that we will be leaving an additional 628,000 children behind who would not have been left behind if we had funded this bill at the Senate levels. We are also turning a blind eye to what is happening on college campuses. State and local budget crunches are hitting, and tuition is skyrocketing in some places by as much as 36 percent. This bill holds Pell grants to a 1\1/2\ percent increase over last year. That simply means college will not be affordable to tens of thousands of young people who want to better themselves by getting a college education. We have an ugly product with respect to both homeland security and a mixed bag with respect to education. I save the worst for last. This bill is sad with respect to both funding and legislative language that will damage the environment and damage our forests and wilderness areas. This bill is a wholesale attack on environmental protection. The interior section of this bill is one of the worst appropriation measures to come to the floor of this House in many years. The park service is cut by $110 million below the President's request. The committee has trampled on a commitment made by the Republican and Democratic leadership of both bodies to provide a specific level of funding for key conservation programs, an agreement that was entered into in order to prevent the creation of yet a new entitlement in this area, and yet the committee has walked away from a solemn commitment that it made. Then we have the environmental riders, or I should say the antienvironmental riders. This bill will exempt the Tongass from any review whatsoever once the regulations are out, and they have not even been completed yet; but this bill will prevent any review of whatever regulations are produced by either administrative challenge or challenge in courts. That is outrageous. It also includes language which again allows funds in this bill to be used for preliminary activities, preliminary to drilling in ANWR. The worst provision involves an innocuous-sounding program called the Forest Stewardship Pilot Program. Currently, there are 80 projects around the country in which noncommercial organizations work at thinning growth in forests that are considered vulnerable to fire. These small projects are not required to get the normal environmental waivers. The House bill proposed to expand the number of projects by 12. The Senate bill would expand the project by 28. Reasonable people can disagree on what ought to happen here, but the conference agreement provides no limits whatsoever. You might as well turn our national forests over lock, stock and barrel to the timber companies. That is what this provision does. There are no longer any legal limits to what can be cut under this provision. Whatever the administration wants, by all means, go ahead. Then, as I said earlier, we have some special provisions. I have mentioned the provision in this bill which is here on behalf of a company that operates three chicken plants in Georgia. This provision says that the USDA shall certify chickens as being organic even if they are not fed organic meal. That provision may boost the profits of one company, but it undermines the integrity of the entire organic certification process. Then there is another nifty little provision that arrived in the Committee on Appropriations last night. It involves the bank accounts of 10 Texas dairy farmers. As we all know, and I know a lot of you like dairy farmers. I do, too. I have a lot of them in my district. They are not getting this kind of treatment. I was stunned to see what was being done in this bill. It seems that these 10 dairy farmers have herds close to the Mexican border. There have been concerns that the herds might be exposed to bovine tuberculosis, and USDA decided that they ought to be slaughtered. The problem is that if the cows had already been infected the farmers would be able to defer tax payments on the money received from the government; but because the cattle had not yet become infected, that deferral option is not allowed under Tax Code. So somebody decided the only fair thing to do was to have the government pay the taxes in full up front. So this bill contains 15 million bucks to be distributed to 10 farmers to cover their tax liability. Had they received the deferral, their benefit would have only been a fraction of that amount. So I guess moral of the story is, there is no limit to how rich you can become if you have certain friends on the Committee on Appropriations. So, Mr. Speaker, I am going to offer a motion to recommit to try to improve this bill in the most egregious area of the bill, and that motion to recommit would negate the language in this bill which allows funds to be used for activities preparatory to drilling in the ANWR. It would also provide funds that eliminate the special rider that abuses the pilot stewardship forest thinning contracting program. We would eliminate the rider that says that Tongass is exempt from all environmental review in court or in administrative activities, and we would raise the first responder funds in this bill to the amount requested by the President. That is what the recommittal motion will do. There are many other provisions I would like to reach. In a recommittal motion we cannot do it under the rules under which we operate, but we are going to try to at least correct the most egregious antienvironmental provisions in this bill and try to put enough money in for first responders so that you can all go home and look at your firemen and policemen with a straight face. I would urge support for the recommittal motion when it comes, and I would urge you to use your own judgment in terms of how to vote on final passage. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. (Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I think everybody here remembers this fellow, President Reagan. He once stood before this body. This is a picture of him doing it. He pointed to an appropriations conference report and he said this: ``This is the conference report, a 1,053-page report weighing 14 pounds.'' Then he said, ``Congress should never send me another one of these.'' Do you know how much this thing weighs today? Do you know how much this weighs? This is over 3,000 pages, and it weighs over 32 pounds. Now, President Reagan was talking about how bad it was when he had a 14-pound document. This is 2\1/2\ times as big. And then we have another outrage. I will get into the rest of the substance later, but I want to mention one thing especially. This bill, for first responders, this bill in terms of the aid we provide to firemen and policemen across the country, is $456 million below even President Bush's request. Does this House really want to vote to cut it that low? Now we are being told that the answer to our security problems is duct tape and plastic sheeting. With all due respect, rather than duct tape and plastic sheeting, I think our firemen would rather have more aid so they can buy the protective equipment that they need to protect their communities. That is just one of the shortcomings of this bill. There is another provision in this bill that gives one chicken farm operation in Georgia the opportunity to put labels on their products calling them organic, even though they are not. There is another provision in this bill which gives 10 farmers in Texas $15 million in special benefits because they cannot quite qualify for a tax provision in the Tax Code. And then we have some other lollapalooza, which I will discuss a little bit later. Now, my colleagues cannot convince me that those provisions would have survived if this bill had gone through the normal debate that normally accompanies appropriation bills. But 90 percent of the dollars, 90 percent of the dollars that we are going to spend as a result of this package have never been debated for one moment on the floor of the House of Representatives. All of the money that is in here is the result of a back-room deal. This is what ought to happen to back-room deals: we ought to leave them on the floor and go back to the drawing board.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, tell me then, is the gentleman objecting to the fact that the Republican chairman of the Committee on the Budget and the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee has asked us to take this action?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield on that point?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Stark).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha), well known for his objection to short debates.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Mr. Speaker, this is the eighth continuing resolution to come before this body necessitated by the fact that we are now in the fifth month of the new fiscal year and still do not have a budget. We have not provided the funds that should be provided for homeland security. The Congress has not provided the funds that should be provided for first responders, for education, to deal with some Medicare and Medicaid problems, and there are many other concerns as well associated with the late action of the Congress on the appropriation bills. None of that fault lies with the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. He has tried his dead level best to bring appropriations bills to the floor in a timely fashion. He has been shut off by decisions made at a higher pay grade. At this point, this House has no choice except to once again extend the continuing resolution. But there are, nonetheless, some items which I think are necessary to take action on because time is running out. The clock is running on a number of crucial problems. For that reason, and I will take the time to explain it now so I do not have to do it twice in the interest of saving time. For that reason, at the appropriate time I will offer a motion to recommit which instructs the Committee on Appropriations to report back an amended version of the continuing resolution that adds two urgent provisions related to payment rates for medical services to Medicare patients. The existing continuing resolution already contains several provisions relating to entitlement benefits, including extensions of the Transitional Assistance to Needy Families program, TANF, and the transitional Medicaid benefits program. This motion simply adds two more time-sensitive items relating to Medicare. First, the motion calls for continuation of Medicare payment rates for doctors at the current level, thereby suspending the 4.4 percent cut now scheduled to take place on March 1. There has already been a 5.4 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors that took effect in January, 2002. These payment cuts make it difficult for doctors to meet their expenses and can only make it harder for Medicare patients to find a doctor willing to treat them. The problem is especially acute in rural areas which are already suffering from shortages of doctors and other health care providers. Second, the motion would take a first step toward redressing the imbalances in the Medicare payments rate that right now puts rural hospitals at a serious disadvantage. Under current law, hospitals in large urban areas receive a base payment rate that is higher than the rate for all other hospitals. The Medicare Payments Advisory Commission has recommended eliminating this differential, noting that Medicare operating margins for rural hospitals are now substantially lower than for large urban hospitals. That just confirms what many of us have been hearing back home, that most rural hospitals are facing serious financial difficulty that jeopardizes their ability to provide quality care. This motion calls for raising base payment rates for rural and small city hospitals up to the rate for large urban areas. These two provisions are just first steps toward redressing imbalances in Medicare payment rates. Congress needs to overhaul the faulty formulas that led to the steep cuts in payment rates and to address a range of issues that place rural areas and many States at a disadvantage. But to gain time for the appropriate committees and the Congress to deal with these broader issues, we need immediate fixes to the immediate problem. That is what this motion seeks to do. Both of these items in the motion are also included in the Senate- passed omnibus appropriations package that is now in conference, the conference to which the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) just referred. Hopefully, a conference agreement on that measure will be finished quickly and with these items included. But we should also include these measures in the continuing resolution as a backup, which is what this motion would do. Furthermore, adoption of this motion would also send a strong signal to House conferees on the omnibus appropriations package and to the House leadership regarding the sentiment of the House on the urgent need to fix Medicare payment rates. Even though the 4.4 percent cut in Medicare physician payments is just weeks away, the House has done nothing effective to forestall that cut. The problem is urgent. The House needs to act now. That is what this motion will attempt to do.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. OBEY. Without the motion's adoption, Mr. Speaker, I certainly am.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I will not take the 5 minutes. I have already explained the motion. Let me simply say I think the need for it is self-evident. It is certainly obvious that small rural hospitals are in a tough financial situation and need relief, and it is certainly obvious that if the scheduled reduction in physician payments under Medicare goes into effect that it will negatively affect many, many Medicare patients. I might not offer this amendment if I thought that the conference was going more smoothly than it is, but certainly in a number of subcommittees there are raging controversies yet to be resolved, and I think under those circumstances it is important that we go on record in support of this proposition.

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 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. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Speaker, yesterday this House refused to provide the financial assistance necessary to our local firemen and policemen and other first responders whose responsibility it is to be our first line of defense against terrorist attacks in communities throughout this country. Today I would hope that the House would not take action to deny the health care resources that American veterans need and deserve. I would hope we would not deny them the funds that those veterans need in order to avoid the kind of service cutoffs that we have seen the VA announce over recent weeks. I know the name of the game on the part of the White House and the majority party leadership is to preserve every possible dollar on the table for tax cuts, a huge percentage of which are aimed at the most well-off 1 percent of the folks in our society who make more than $300,000. I understand that that is the name of the game. But in my view, while I certainly wish those folks well and while I think they ought to share in the same tax cuts provided other people, I think that veterans need VA health care more than someone who is earning $500,000 a year needs to have an extra jumbo-sized tax cut. So I would simply ask Members of this House, do not, please, pose for political ``holy pictures'' by having photo ops at local schools, if the only thing you are willing to send those local schools is a new set of mandates without the money to help pay for them. Do not do that. School districts are in too big a squeeze and State governments with their financial problems are in too big a squeeze already. All we are asking you to do is, within the possibilities presented by this conference report, we are asking you to vote for the maximum amount possible in order to come closer than we will otherwise come to meeting the promises so far unfulfilled of the No Child Left Behind Act. I urge a ``yes'' vote on the motion to instruct. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 10 minutes. Mr. Speaker, Article I of the Constitution states that no money can be drawn from the Treasury except by act of Congress. That is the essence of the separation and balance of power in this government. It is the core function of this body. It is what makes this a legislative body, not a Soviet-style rubber stamp. So let me ask what some Members might find to be a somewhat embarrassing question: How did the House of Representatives get through an entire session of Congress last year without ever even calling up for debate Senate appropriation bills that fund more than three- quarters of the government outside of the Department of Defense? Now I am not asking why we failed to pass the bills. There can be numerous answers to that question. I am not asking why we did not complete the conference report. That could easily be blamed on the intransigence or inaction of the other body. What I am asking is how could be we fail to even call up for debate on this floor, on this floor, the basic pieces of legislation to fund the government when that is our fundamental responsibility as an institution. Mr. Speaker, this is the 108th Congress. This is the 215th year in which this body has gathered to perform our duties under the Constitution. As a result, it is quite difficult to do something in Congress that has never been done before, but I think this body in the last Congress actually succeeded in that respect. The House Republican leadership never even let these bills out of committee, never debated on the House floor whether the amounts requested or the sums recommended by the committee were too much or too little, never allowed the elected representatives of the American people to vote on any of these matters. The result, the party that is oh, so noisy in talking about accountability for teachers and schools is oh, so silent when it comes to the accountability of Members of Congress. You cannot be held accountable for the choices you never make, and that is the game that has gone on here for almost a year. Mr. Speaker, how can there be a more fundamental breakdown of the institution? What a disgrace. What was it that we did all year that was so important we could not at least call these bills up? I want to make it quite clear, there is one person in this institution who I am not referring to, and that is the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, who has gone to the mat time and time again to try to get this House to meet its responsibilities. He has spoken on the subject often and eloquently, and it is in spite of his very considerable efforts that we find ourselves where we are today. In my mind there is one issue at the bottom of this: the majority party leadership in this House abandoned its central responsibility under the Constitution and to the American people in order to get political cover on one issue. They love to talk the talk on education, but they are not willing to walk the walk. They are not willing to put their money where their mouths are. Oh, yes, they like to visit schools. They like to read to children when the cameras are around; and oh, they love to make TV ads about how important education is and how much they care about it. They like to vote for big, expensive authorization programs creating new major responsibilities for local boards to meet, and they like to promise huge sums of Federal money to pay for them. They love to do all of those things. There is only one thing that they apparently cannot and will not do, and that is pay the bill afterwards. Now most people have seen a con artist in action, at least in the movies. They have the capacity to seem in almost every respect to be someone quite different from whom they really are. That is what the majority party has done over the last several years with respect to education. Of course, the only time they get caught at the game is when the appropriations bills are on the floor. That is the one point in time when all of the pretty images fall apart, all of photo ops, press releases and slick TV ads, that is the time when they do not run true; and that is why this day has been delayed for almost 8 months, well after the election, well after the opportunity of the American people to measure whether the rhetoric coming out of the Congress and this administration has anything whatsoever to do with the reality as far as education is concerned. Unfortunately, even now we do not have an appropriate bill in front of us. We do not have specific funding levels proposed for specific programs. We have the most confusing hodgepodge of numbers it would be possible to concoct, and a motion to go to conference on those numbers. That is an open invitation to have a small group of people bring back an all-or-nothing omnibus package so big and so complex and so late in the year that we can claim that we just had to vote for it, even though it is on a program-by-program basis 180 degrees at variance with what a large majority of this body claims to support. Today I want to give this House an opportunity to send a different message to the conference. I want to give Members on the other side of the aisle who truly believe what they say about resources in the classroom, better teachers, small classes, stronger curriculum a chance to stand up and say to Mitch Daniels and their leadership here in the House that they are for real, that they insist on a bottom line that is much higher for education than the numbers that my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula), has been given to work with. Our motion to instruct simply says that the allocation to the bill that contains education funding shall not be smaller when the bill comes back to the House than the sums contained in the Senate bill. If we take all of the increases the Senate says it would like to make in that bill, we find ourselves $9.55 billion over the level the House has allocated to the Regula bill. Even after we subtract the remarkable across-the-board cuts contained in the Senate package, this bill is about $5.7 billion above House levels. CBO has not scored it yet, and so we do not have precise numbers; but that is about where we believe the Senate ends up. We are asking that the House direct its conferees to begin this conference by agreeing with the Senate on that overall funding level. It is not at the level of increase in our schools that we have provided in any of the last 6 years. It would mean that the result of all of the time and debate we spent in enacting No Child Left Behind would be to scale back the funds that we are sending to schools. It is not the level that we can and should provide, but under the rules we are working under it is the best we can do; and it is without any question the least we should do. I would simply note, by the way, that the bludgeoning-nature of the across-the-board cuts provided by the Senate has resulted in unacceptable damage to a number of other crucial activities in areas such as health and science. There are two other parts to this motion. One is that the level of funds for homeland security activities in this package shall not fall below the levels requested by the President so far as it is possible within the scope of the conference. Yesterday, I catalogued just how inadequate the President's budget is for homeland security, for port protection, for first responders. But the Senate's across-the- board cuts have taken more than a billion dollars from homeland security activities. Our intent is to restore those funds. It, at the very least, will make clear that the education funds will not be coming from homeland security. Finally, we have a crisis in veterans' medical care. The across-the- board cuts in the Senate bill significantly exacerbates that crisis. We direct in this motion the conferees to go to the highest possible level for veterans' medical care that is within the scope of the conference. I will be very blunt about this instruction. If anyone votes for it, they are setting parameters on the conference that do not permit the conference to come back within the allocation that Mitch Daniels and the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) have established. This motion says to them that the line that they have drawn in the sand for education and other domestic needs is unrealistic. We need to move on and resolve these differences, and we need to support local schools. This is not the end of the process; this is step one. If a majority of this body votes to agree with the Senate that we need this $5.7 billion increase for education, and the Congress then agrees to a conference report that rejects the position taken by both Houses, the American people will then know exactly what is going on around here. They are going to know at that point exactly how phony all of these press releases and TV ads on education have been. Mr. Speaker, no one should vote for this motion if they intend to vote for a later conference report that scales back funding for the very education programs we are trying to protect by this motion. That would be an act of hypocrisy that would be startling even by the standards of this town.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts, the new ranking member of the Committee on Financial Services.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), the ranking member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. (Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)