Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield the remaining 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the distinguished minority leader.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 \1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney). (Mrs. MALONEY asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks, and include extraneous material.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez). (Mr. MENENDEZ asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 \1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, could I inquire again how much time we have remaining on each side?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 10 seconds. It does require a partnership between the local and Federal Government. The problem is the Federal Government will not come out on the dance floor and dance. They are leaving the locals out there alone. They have yet to provide one dime in new money. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 \1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, how much time is remaining on both sides?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 15 seconds. Mr. Speaker, we have been hearing we will do it next time around for a year and a half. Meanwhile, you have gotten zip to the local people who need it the most. We were told a year ago, oh, we will do it down the line. We were told in the supplemental, oh, we will do it down the line. Now you are saying here, we will do it down the line. Do it now.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman mentioned supplemental. I would suggest he call the White House and tell the President to reconsider his veto of the last supplemental that we sent to him where he denied us the ability to get $300 million to those first responders.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, let me simply say the gentleman is correct, we did; and I was immensely proud of the House on both sides of the aisle for cooperating in producing that bill, and I was flabbergasted that that cooperation on the part of the White House did not extend to our next request to provide for additional money, including the first responders. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I have another motion to recommit at the desk.

Mr. OBEY. Safe assumption, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I will not take the 5 minutes, but let me simply say that this motion simply does two things. It would provide that we will approve $3.5 billion in homeland security grants to first responders, and it will provide the additional $90 million that is needed to continue the study of long-term medical effects caused by the disaster of 9-11 when our firemen and our policemen and other emergency workers immediately responded to the hits on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. When those firemen and policemen and other emergency workers responded to the Nation's needs at the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center and in Pennsylvania, for that matter as well, on 9-11, they did not stop to ask does this fit in our fiscal year? Are we going to exceed our budgets? They simply responded, did their duty, and did what had to be done. Today I want to make clear this motion will not bust the Republican budget. Even if this money is still provided, we will still be within the overall ceilings of the Republican budget resolution. So no one can claim if they vote against this motion that they did so in order to preserve the sanctity of the budget, resolution because we do not breach it. I would simply urge the House to adopt the motion.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I want to walk through once more what the record is with respect to dealing with this problem. Right after 9-11, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and I went down to the White House. He and I and our staff chiefs, when we were locked out of our offices because of the anthrax scare, he and I went downtown to the White House after we had spent a week talking to every security agency in town, virtually, trying to find out what they thought the needs were on the homeland security front. We went down to the White House, expecting to have a give-and-take discussion about what additional funding we ought to provide. We ran smack into the President of the United States, who walked into the room, shook hands, sat down, and then said, and I am paraphrasing, but this is pretty close, he said, well, I understand some of you want to provide more money for homeland security; but I want you to know that my good friend, Mitch Daniels, tells me that we have more than enough money in the budget for our request. I want you to know if Congress spends one dime more on homeland security than we have asked for in our budget, I will veto the bill. Now I have time for four or five comments, and then I have to get out of here. That is what he said. So when my turn came, I expressed my lack of enthusiasm to that kind of rigid response, and I proceeded to ask the President a number of questions about security threats to a number of Federal installations, threats which were serious and classified. We urged the President to reconsider. In the end, over White House opposition, this Congress on a bipartisan basis provided $4 billion additional money for homeland security, including, I believe, about $400 million for first responders. Then last year in the spring supplemental, as I indicated earlier, the White House asked for no additional money for first responders; so no money for our policemen, no money for our firemen, no money for our public health people. The House and Senate worked again on a bipartisan basis, and we provided $551 million in that supplemental. The President vetoed $350 million of that amount. Then finally the administration slowly awoke, and it provided $3.5 billion in their budget request for 2003; but then they cooperated in a procedure that prevented that money from ever becoming law, because they agreed with the procedure that kept the VA- HUD bill and the State-Justice-Commerce bill from ever coming to the floor. So now we are operating under a continuing resolution which provides $650 million, far less than we need for first responders. We need several billion more. Yet, even after the administration had that authority to spend the money, they refused to allocate the money to the States. They have been fiddling around about proposed formula changes, rather than getting the stuff out there so we can accelerate our preparedness at the local level. If Members think we are ready for another attack, I invite them to read the report of the Rudman-Hart Commission, which spells out that we are still mortally unprepared to deal with local attacks. So now we are faced with this situation, and despite the fact that the track record clearly shows that the administration has been resistent to congressional efforts to provide assistance to first responders, the White House Chief of Staff has told the country that it is the Congress that has not provided the money, when in fact the Congress on three occasions did provide the money or tried to and on each of those occasions the White House resisted. So what we will be asking the House to do is to provide this additional funding: the $3.5 billion to first responders and the $90 million for the epidemiological studies of the health impacts on the firemen and police personnel who had to respond at the Pentagon and in New York after 9-11. And we would remind our friends on both sides of the aisle that this does not bust the budget. If you vote for our amendment, it will still keep us within the Republican budget resolution which seems to be so important on that side of the aisle. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Ruppersberger).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 7 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I would like to spend just a moment or two discussing how we got to this place, and then repeat for emphasis what I just said on the rule, so people understand what it is we are going to be trying to do here today. We are really in the situation where, well into the fiscal year, we have yet to pass 11 of the 13 appropriation bills, primarily because the budget resolution that was brought to this House floor in the first instance unrealistically stated what the needs of the country would be, or the congressional estimate of what those needs would be. So to try to keep the session moving anyway, the majority party brought out two appropriation bills. Then the system just sort of fell apart because of the unreality of the budget resolution, and we have been stuck with no other appropriation bills becoming law, so we have been operating on continuing resolutions. I would ask the gentleman, is this continuing resolution number 13? Something like that. I have lost track, we have had so many of them. Now we are supposed to pass yet another continuing resolution so that the House and Senate have more time in order to put together an omnibus appropriation bill which will at long last produce funding for all of the domestic agencies in the Federal Government. So this proposal is here to give us another week to get that work done. Mr. Speaker, we have two questions left. Number 1 is, what is the appropriate funding for those appropriation bills; and number 2, when are we going to get it done? As far as I know, we still do not have paper on this side of the Capitol, so we still do not know what the Senate has done in detail. This proposal before us now simply keeps the government open. The question is, what level of funding should we have in this short-term CR? We believe that, in addition to the funding that is being provided under the resolution being brought to the floor by the gentleman from Florida, we ought to add another $3.5 billion to fund the first responders, so that our policemen and our firemen and our public health people can get about the business of protecting us at the local level. We cannot expect State governments to provide this money, because they are in massive deficits all around the country. If we do not provide it, it is not going to get provided. The second thing we want to do is to provide $90 million to Centers for Disease Control for baseline health screening, so we can do a long- term assessment of the health exposure experienced by first providers at the Pentagon and in New York on 9-11 when they ran into the combat zone, so to speak, and experienced an assault by many chemicals, some of which were suspected of being highly toxic. So that is what we want to do. As I said, I think it is especially important to do this in light of the misstatement by the White House Chief of Staff on national television last week. Last week, as I said in my earlier remarks, Mr. Card, the White House Chief of Staff, told Tim Russert, the moderator of Meet the Press, that the reason that the first responders did not have the money that they needed was because Congress had not acted on the money and had tied it up. I found that especially quaint given the fact that the President vetoed the lion's share of the money that we provided for first responders in the supplemental last year, money which would have gone through to the local communities if the administration had not vetoed bipartisan congressional efforts. So what we see is that on four occasions, as I said earlier, the White House has either blocked or resisted bipartisan efforts in both Houses to provide additional money for first responders. I will ask the House at the proper time today to approve this motion to recommit so that we can add this funding. I want to point out that it will still keep us within the Republican budget resolution. We will still have over $1 billion head room in the Republican budget resolution if we add this amendment, because the continuing resolution is operating at a funding level significantly below that Republican funding resolution. So I do not want to hear any claptrap on the floor today about how we are busting the budget with this motion. We are not; we are staying within the confines of the Republican budget resolution. But within that, we are saying it is time, it is time to deliver the money that the first responders thought they were going to get a long time ago, so we can get about the business, for a change, of dealing with substantive problems, rather than ping-ponging political arguments while we send no money to the people who are going to be on the front lines if we have any further terrorist attacks.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, if the majority is going to abuse the rules in such a way that the minority is precluded from meeting its responsibilities, I have no alternative but to appeal the ruling of the Chair.

Mr. OBEY. Without the pending recommit motion, certainly.

Mr. OBEY. I certainly do, Mr. Speaker. The gentleman contends the motion is not in order because the majority has failed to file its 302(b) allocations. If this amendment were to be ruled out of order, what that would mean is that the majority has put the fix in in the Committee on Rules so that they can bring what they want to bring to the floor but the minority cannot. In other words, the minority would be penalized procedurally for a failure to act on the part of the majority. I would find that to be a quaint interpretation indeed. It is patently unfair to allow the majority to bring up a bill without filing its suballocations and then punish the minority for something the majority has not done.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Let me simply say to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) that as far as I am concerned he has done everything humanly possible to try to see to it that we could provide the needed money to first responders. He tried that a year ago on the supplemental when he was pushed into backing away by the White House and by his own leadership, but we still got $4 billion additional homeland security money in that bill despite the resistance of the White House. And he also worked with us cooperatively to see to it that we had more money in the supplemental this previous summer for homeland security and for first responders. Again, the White House vetoed those efforts, so I congratulate the gentleman for his efforts. I just wish that the White House had been responsive to them. If they had, we would not be sitting here now worrying about the fact that they still do not have dime one that they need at the local level. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Turner).

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 offer a motion to recommit.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, after 9-11, it became obvious to all of us, I think on both sides of the aisle, that we needed to equip the people at the local level who will respond to terrorist attacks with the best equipment that we could possibly find to make certain their equipment was compatible and safe enough to do the job. For reasons that I find difficult to fathom, the White House has resisted efforts to do that on four separate occasions. The first example is what happened on the supplemental a year ago. After 9-11, the committee, on both sides of the aisle, agreed that we ought to add more money for first responders, and we tried to do that. The White House strenuously resisted. In fact, at one point the President personally told us that he would veto one dime more than the White House had appropriated for homeland security items. Despite that fact, on a bipartisan basis, the House and the Senate approved $400 million in funding for first responders in that supplemental. Then, last year, in their second supplemental which the administration sent up, they still provided no request for first responders. Again, the House and the Senate, acting on a bipartisan basis in both Houses provided, after much White House resistance, $551 million for first responders for firemen, for policemen, and the other folks at the local level who are our first line of defense against terrorist attacks in our communities. The President vetoed $350 million of that $500 million. Finally, the administration did request $3.5 billion for first responders in the regular 2003 appropriations bill, but it then proceeded to back the political strategy in the House that prevented the veterans under the VA-HUD bill from coming to the floor; and it prevented the State, Justice, Commerce appropriations bill from coming to the floor. As a result, neither of those bills which were supposed to contain funding for first responders, neither of those bills passed. And then, when the continuing resolution finally passed, which was supposed to contain $650 million for first responders, the White House saw to it that the agency would not apportion that money among the States and localities. So after we have that track record, the White House resistance to bipartisan congressional support for adding money for first responders, the White House chief of staff went on national television last Sunday, Mr. Card did, and told Mr. Russert, the moderator, and the entire country that the only reason first responders were not getting their money is because the Congress had not done its job. Baloney. In capital letters, BALONEY. The fact is that both political parties, on a bipartisan basis in both the House and the Senate, on four separate occasions tried to meet our responsibilities in providing the funding that was needed for first responders and, the White House, in each of those instances, either flatly rejected the money or saw to it that they would use their power in order to squeeze down the amount of money that we wanted to provide for those initiatives. So now, what I am going to urge Members to do when we get to the resolution today is to vote for a motion which we will offer which restores that needed money for first responders. It is time for two things to happen: it is time for the White House to stop peddling fiction about why the first responders at the local level do not have badly needed money to deal with terrorism problems at the local level; and, secondly, it is time for us to actually get the money out to them so that we do not have to sit, the next time we have a terrorist attack saying, gee whiz, I wish we had done something.