Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I certainly am, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this motion will, as I said, provide increases to the following accounts: For veterans medical care it will provide a $2.4 billion increase; for the National Institutes of Health for bioterrorism and general research it will increase funding by $2.8 billion; for FEMA for State and local first responders it will increase funding by $2.6 billion; for the Securities and Exchange Commission for corporate oversight it will increase funding by $300 million to finally put some teeth back in that agency; and it ensures that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has sufficient funding to provide effective oversight of the SEC and corporate accounting standards. There are other items that I would like to have in the recommit motion, Mr. Speaker, but because of the parliamentary situation, for instance, we are precluded from including items that would include an extension of the unemployment compensation program to long-term unemployed workers. We are precluded from adding funding that was just raised by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Lampson) on the Medicare givebacks for providers, and we have not been able to include funding at this point for additional support for education. That does not mean those items should not also be addressed. They should. But right now we have just been told that the bill that will come up later today will in fact give Congressional blessing to the idea that the deficit will be increased by at least $30 billion on the mandatory side and yet somehow we are committing a mortal sin if we try to provide more funding for veterans medical care, for medical research, to our local police and firemen to strengthen our response against terrorism, and to the SEC in order to ensure that corporate balance sheets are actually on the square and legitimate. I find that kind of logic quaint. I think that each of these items is perfectly defensible. And with that, Mr. Speaker, I would urge a yes vote on the motion to recommit. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for raising the point. Unfortunately, that is one of the many items that will not be corrected when this CR passes. You will have those cutbacks go into effect in January. In addition, we lose other items which we cannot reach in our motion to recommit, such as the need to extend unemployment compensation. That is not going to be taken care of, either. This is just another example of the Congress walking away from its responsibilities.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the distinguished gentleman from Florida a question. As he knows, this committee has been trying to convince the House leadership for months that with a few billion of additional allocation, we could produce appropriation bills that would produce very large bipartisan majority support in both Houses. As he knows, we have been asking for roughly around $10 billion. I know the gentleman has. We have been told, ``Oh, you cannot do that because the Committee on Appropriations is a big spender.'' But as I understand the rule that just passed, the bill that will follow ours that was approved by the rule will in fact wipe out the requirement to sequester because on the entitlement side of the budget, we see an explosion on the deficit of well over $100 billion; and when you take into account all of the exemptions that you have from this sequestration requirement, the Congress is in essence saying, ``Well, do not worry, it is on the mandatory side. So we will let that $30 billion expansion of the deficit that would be avoided by sequestration, we will let that go ahead.'' These same folks who are attacking this committee for being big spenders are in fact wiping out a requirement to compensate for spending that is more than three times as large as the amount that this committee is asking for to fix the appropriations bills. Is that not roughly the situation?

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Speaker, what the gentleman's comments come down to is that the same House leadership that has told the Committee on Appropriations that we cannot make these bills healthy enough to pass by adding roughly $10 billion to them for appropriation bills, the same leadership is asking us to allow the Congress to get out of town with a license to provide spending for more than $30 billion on the entitlement side. I think that exposes the double standard to which we have been subjected for this entire year. That is why in my motion to recommit I will have a motion that does the following: it will add $2.4 billion to veterans medical care to help reduce the backlog that veterans face now when they go into a VA hospital and want to see a specialist. It will add $2.8 billion to the funding level for the National Institutes of Health so that NIH will be able to proceed to provide its new grants and contracts. Otherwise, they will be in trouble come January. It will provide $2.6 billion in additional funding to FEMA for State and local first responders grants to help police and firemen get up to speed in dealing with our antiterrorism efforts. And it will add $300 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to bring that funding level up to $776 million, which is the amount that the Congress promised in the authorization that it would provide back when the heat was on when the public was upset about fraud that was going on in many American corporations. Unfortunately, now this CR will not meet that commitment either. So when the time comes, I will offer that recommit motion and I wanted to, in the interest of saving some time, notify the House of that right now. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee). (Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Lampson).

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 8 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I think Members will recall when we were sitting around here last February and March waiting for the President to send up the supplemental and talking about starting the appropriations bills after we got back from the spring recess. The dogwoods bloomed and the cherry trees bloomed and, finally, the azaleas; and yet we had no appropriations bills. So then we had talked about how busy the summer was going to be after we had gotten back from the Memorial Day recess. We had droughts across most of the country. We had forest fires in the West. Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open, and the All Star Game ended in a tie, and nearly three- quarters of the appropriations bills during that time never even got to the House floor. After all of that transpired, we left for the August recess talking about how impossible the fall would be. We were going to have long nights and late nights, and that was going to be the only way that the House could get its work done before the election. Well, we returned in September and we did not work those long weeks or those long nights. The Republican leadership of the House would not let the chairman of the committee take up the bills that the committee had reported. And in September we had a continuing of the work style of the previous 3 or 4 months. We would have our first votes occurring on Tuesday evenings for the week, and we would have wheels up at National Airport going back to our districts by noon on Thursday or close to it. And so when we left in October, we had passed only two of 13 appropriations bills. We had funded only one of the 15 departments of the U.S. Government, and not a single domestic agency had a budget for the fiscal year that had already begun. We left town then for the election, and we said that the lame duck session would be a tough one, that the work load would be enormous, that Congress would be forced to stay in session until Christmas Eve. But guess what? Wrong again. We simply are seeing the magic switch being used one more time. Put the government on automatic pilot and go home. So what have we accomplished? Well, the Director of the Customs Service will no longer report to an Under Secretary in the Treasury Department. He will report to an Under Secretary in another building in a new bureaucracy. That is our achievement on the Homeland Security front. I frankly do not think Osama bin Laden will care. He may even realize that all of the moving of desks and phones and computers over the next couple of years in the new Department of Homeland Security is likely to create gaps in our security and give him openings to do his dirty work. But what will happen to the plan of the Director of the Customs Service to inspect the millions of 40-foot long steel containers that get shipped into the United States each year when they leave Europe or Asia or Latin America? I think Osama will be glad that the Congress did not find time to fund that initiative. What about the money that the FBI Director needs to upgrade his computers, to hire more analysts, to get translators to speak Arabic, Farsi or Pashto. I am sure that Osama will be glad that the Congress did not get around to fixing that problem either. And how about the money we were supposed to give to local fire and police departments so they could have common communications systems so that the first responders would have protection in dealing with biological and chemical attacks? Well, I guess apparently the judgment of Congress is that that can wait. After all, who knows, maybe the next major attack in this country may not come until next summer or, if we are lucky, even later. So again, Congress chooses to not deal with the problem. What about the money for the Public Health Service to buy the anthrax vaccine for first responders and others that would have to cope with an attack? The same answer, no action. But I guess we need another break. After all, we have had a tough election season. Apparently the Congress has to rest up from all of its recesses and those weeks we had to slave from Tuesday evening through Thursday noon before we went back to our districts. And certainly Congress needs to rest up from all of the promises that it has made during the election, promises about how much we care about the economy and people being squeezed by the economic downturn. But apparently we are not going to stay here now to deal with the extension of unemployment benefits; we are not going to fix the problems at the National Institutes of Health; we are not going to fix the highway problems; we are not going to fix the problem of the underfunding of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But after all, apparently Members of the House are really worn out from all of the TV ads we all had to run telling our constituents how much we cared for the elderly and how hard we were going to work to ensure that they got the medical care and the prescription drugs that they needed. If running those ads had been less arduous, maybe we could have persuaded the majority party to stay around for a few more days to do its work. I know that the chairman of the committee would like to do that, but apparently he has been overruled by his caucus or by his leadership or by the House and Senate leadership combined, if we can call that leadership by walking away from their responsibilities. Mr. Speaker, I would simply say that this is a pitiful performance by a pitiful Congress walking away from its major responsibility. This Congress has not even found the will to pass the appropriation bills, which is the main job Congress has each year. I do not know why Members run for reelection for another 2 years if they do not want to do the work that they were elected to do in the previous 2 years. I guess there are a lot of mysteries in this place I do not understand. This resolution is going to pass. We will come in here on January 7, and we will kick the can down the road again. We will come in long enough to sign up for our new 2-year lease on our paychecks, and then Congress will apparently adjourn again without doing anything to deal with the major problems that Congress is facing on the appropriations side. I guess it is a harbinger of things to come, but it is a disgrace. I for one am not going to vote for this continuing resolution because what it really is is a spectacular abdication of responsibility, which is not worthy of this body. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton).

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this is a pitiful exercise. Its arrogance is matched only by its futility and its hypocrisy. I think we ought to recount what is happening here and how we got here. Early last year, the majority party, at the insistence of the Committee on the Budget and the House Republican leadership, passed a budget which even their own Republican leadership on the Committee on Appropriations indicated fell at least $10 billion short of the amount that we would need to meet our own obligations on the domestic front for education, for transportation, for veterans' health care, for National Institutes of Health, homeland security, and a number of other items. The Committee on Appropriations, after that budget resolution was passed, tried to operate under it and tried to bring a number of appropriation bills to the floor. They produced the Department of Defense bill, the military construction bill; and the committee met its obligations in those two areas. But then, Mr. Speaker, it was prevented from bringing any other appropriation bills to conclusion by an internal fight within the Republican Caucus in this House. What happened is that the hard-line conservatives in the Republican Caucus told their leadership they would not vote for any domestic appropriation bill until the education appropriation bill was passed at a freeze level recommended by the President, which would have brought to a halt the previous increases that we had in the area of education, the increases that we had over the last 5 years that averaged over 13 percent. The House Republican leadership forbade the Committee on Appropriations to bring appropriation bills to the floor. And they said, ``Oh, no, we will deal with them after the August recess.'' Well, the August recess came and went. We came back on Labor Day and then we were told, ``No, we cannot pass any appropriations bills during this period either. We are going to have to lay it over until a lame- duck session after the election.'' Mr. Speaker, now we are here in a lame-duck session, and now we are being told by this resolution that we are going to kick this down the trail and we are not going to come back until next year, which means that every single appropriation bill is going to have to be introduced anew and have to start from scratch. All that work gets wiped out. Why? Because the majority party has not decided how they want to handle these issues and because they have a lot of Members who want to go on congressional trips. So now we are being told to forget our duty. But then there is an added wrinkle that is being brought to the floor here today. The appropriations Republican leadership has been begging the House leadership since June to give the Committee on Appropriations at least $8 billion to $10 billion more so we could meet our transportation and our education and our homeland security obligations. They have been denied that. The House Budget Committee has been saying, ``Oh, oh, oh, the Committee on Appropriations, they want to be big spenders. We cannot give them the $10 billion.'' But now what is happening under this rule? We are being asked to wipe out the PAYGO realities. That is an ``inside baseball'' term, but what it means essentially is that this Congress is going to add $30 billion more to the deficit because of that useless farm bill that passed earlier in the year and because of the tax cuts. So the very same people on the Budget Committee who are attacking the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) as a big spender because he wants $8 billion to $10 billion more to finish the appropriations bills, the very same people are saying, ``Oh, by the way, we cannot have that money; but by the way, we are going to blow $30 billion, and then we are going to wipe out the scorekeeping and pretend it did not happen.'' Mr. Speaker, that is what we are being asked to vote for on this rule today and on the two bills that will follow. Mr. Speaker, this is a pitiful performance. What a laugh. What a pity. What a joke. What a poor performance. Mr. Speaker, I am going to vote against this rule, and I am going to vote against the bill that follow because they epitomize the absolute uselessness and fecklessness of this entire congressional session. They demonstrate that the one thing this House has learned to do better than anything else is to duck its responsibilities, and that is a shame.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I am sorry, but earlier in my discussions I understated the amount by which the deficit will be expanded with the approval of the Congress with the subsequent motion that will follow from this rule. It is not just $30 billion. I am told it is over $60 billion that will be added to the deficit from the base on mandatories.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

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 would simply point out to both of the gentlemen who have just spoken from the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure that I warned the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure before the election when we debated this that they were going to be short-sheeted on this continuing resolution, and that has now, unfortunately, come to pass. So I would say that I agree with the observations of the gentleman from Alaska (Mr. Young), all but one of them. I would also say that it is not true that only highways are being hurt by this continuing resolution. The National Institutes of Health will encounter a severe problem in issuing their grants for the year. Veterans will not be able to have the backlogs dealt with in terms of veterans health care. The Securities and Exchange Commission is not going to be funded at the level that was promised in the authorization bill before the election. We are not going to see the Medicare give- backs that our providers around the country were looking for. There are going to be all kinds of other problems as well as the highway problem. So I think there are a good many reasons, including the highway problem, to vote against this rule and against this resolution.

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, could I ask that the Clerk read the resolution? It is four lines long.

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

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, we hear from the other side of the aisle that it is the Senate's fault that we have not done our work. It has been 84 days since the House last considered an appropriation bill. We have been here for 84 days. Our number one job has been to pass the appropriation bills. And because of an internal war in the Republican Caucus, these 84 days have been wasted. They have been blown. It is time to quit being the Alibi Ikes of the Cosmos. It is time to face up to our duty. It is time to use at least 1 day in these 84 days to get the country's work done. We have done the military bills. We have done Iraq. This House has not finished work on a single domestic appropriation bill. It ought to be ashamed of itself.