Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. I would like to respond to something the gentleman just said. He says that we should not be impatient because the airlines have taken care of their cockpit security. Yes, they have done it, on the cheap, Kmart style. The fact is that this bill contains $250 million less for cockpit security than the President recommended. It contains that lower amount of money because it added to the President's request for sky marshals. I agree that was a higher priority, but in my view both of them should be funded. You ask any citizen in America, Do you want those cockpit doors secured by a temporary device or do you want them secured in a way that will hold against the most professional attacks, and you know what the answer is going to be. They do not want us to be temporizing and they do not want us to be patient. They want us to be impatient, they want us to be aggressive, and they want us to act now.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards).

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton), who does not have a vote in this House but who should have.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I continue to reserve my point of order, and I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I think the gentleman in the well is a very constructive Member, and I consider him to be a good friend of mine. I do not want to in any way prejudge this project because I do not know anything about it. But in light of some of the things that have happened today, I want to make some observations about this project. This project was brought before the Subcommittee on Energy and Water. That subcommittee is controlled 7 to 4 by the majority party. The subcommittee looked at it and chose not to approve it. Now we are being asked to approve an energy and water project on a Department of Defense appropriations bill. It is what is traditionally called by some people pork because it is an individual project for an individual Member. I make no judgment about whether that is good or bad. I am not offended by pork if it is responsible. I think it is just as reasonable for Congress to designate projects as it is for the Secretary of any agency. But I want to note that for the last 2 weeks I have been begging this House to review objectively and support a crucial amendment that would have addressed many of the crucial homeland security issues facing this country. The White House attacked that amendment for being laden with pork, although there was not a single pork item in it; and I defy anyone to show me one. The Republican leadership in this House peddled the same misinformation to the press, that the amendment we were seeking to provide as a matter of urgent safety, they kept trying to imply to the press that it was laden with pork when in fact it had not a single pork item. They used that argument to block our ability to provide additional border security, additional port security, more help for the FBI, and a variety of other actions, including added protection against weapons-grade nuclear material. Mr. Chairman, that is one of the reasons that it was hard for at least a week to get the press to pay attention to what was actually in our package because of the misinformation being spread about it, all under the rubric of the term ``pork.'' Now we are being asked to provide for a Member of the Republican leadership as an add-on to this bill an item that can only be called pork. I could object to this under the rules of the House, the very rules that denied our security amendment an opportunity to have a vote. I am not going to do that because I respect the gentleman in the well and I do not consider myself, without further study, qualified to judge the merits of this project. It is probably legitimate. I do not know. All I know is that there is a very different standard being applied by the House leadership on this issue in comparison to the standard that was misapplied in order to make it more difficult to communicate to Members the content of our own security-related bill. I will not, Mr. Chairman, raise the point of order that I could raise against this project. If the majority has enough chutzpah to proceed after they have pummeled us with mislabels for the past 2 weeks on an important matter of national security, so be it. Again, I want to emphasize, I do not criticize the gentleman. He is doing for his district what he thinks is legitimate, and all of us have a right to do that and I do not condemn that project until I know more about it. But I do condemn a process that enables people to smear a legitimate amendment like ours for over 2 weeks by mislabeling it as pork when in fact we had not a single item in that amendment that in any way could be called an item of pork. Mr. Chairman, with that I withdraw my reservation of a point of order.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, we also have no objection on this side of the aisle.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from New York (Mr. Serrano).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green), a State which has a number of very serious security threats which we are trying to correct in this bill.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, if I understand this correctly, this is what I refer to as a holy-picture amendment. The administration asked for 200-and-some million dollars for the Coast Guard. The bill before us cut it by $58 million. I tried earlier today to defeat the rule under which this bill is being considered so that we could add not just the $60 million that the gentleman is asking to be added to the Coast Guard's budget, but $223 million so that we could fully finance the increased pace of Coast Guard operations to combat terrorism for an entire year rather than the 6 months that is in the bill. I find it interesting that the gentleman voted against our efforts to in fact make in order the amendment which the House could under the rules have adopted, and yet is pursuing today an amendment which is clearly going to be ruled out of order. I find that effort enough to give inconsistency a bad name. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes and simply make two points in response to the gentleman's comment. The issue is, should we provide this money now or should we wait until the administration decides at a later date that it might be necessary? I think strengthening inspections on the Canadian border is something that should happen now, not later. I think that port security personnel should occur now. I think that upgrading computers at the FBI ought to occur now, not 6 or 8 months from now. I think that providing additional security for a number of classified facilities around the country that have severe security lapses ought to be corrected now, not later. The problem with the supplemental is that we have no guarantee that it will not take months to get through. We can try to push it through this House very quickly. That is no guarantee it will go quickly in the other body. Secondly, if you do it on a supplemental, it will cost more. I have never in my life seen a supplemental pass through the Senate where we were able to get a Senator to vote for it by taking something out. Almost always they want to add something; and in the end, especially in an election year, the costs rise. So it seems to me the most fiscally disciplined way to proceed is the way we have outlined in this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 12 minutes. Mr. Chairman, what we have done at this point in the bill, and I sense a little confusion around here, what we have done is to conclude the core defense appropriation bill for the coming year. We are now moving on to the supplemental title, which deals with funding for many of the activities that were promised after the events of September 11. I want to say with respect to the proposal that is before us that there is no real difference between the minority and the majority on the items that are at present in the bill, as added by the committee. What the committee did, and let me back up and speak very frankly, when the chairman, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), and I were trying to consider what other actions might be necessary to combat terrorism, in addition to those that were funded or that were going to be funded in the original $20 billion that was left over from the earlier agreement, his staff and mine began to work on a common list of actions that ought to be taken in order to protect our homeland. About halfway through that process, after we had expected to come to the floor and come to the committee with a bipartisan recommendation, as we all know, the White House decided that they were going to draw a line in the sand and that they were going to veto any bill which spent one dime more than they had requested for homeland security. So at that point, the chairman had some tough choices to make. I do not quarrel with any of the choices that he made, because he was being forced to operate within an artificial ceiling. But in my view, when I go home to my district and walk down Main Street in any significant town in my district and ask people what their priorities are, they put homeland security before many other expenditures in the budget. They put homeland security ahead of tax cuts. They put homeland security ahead of retroactively repealing the corporate minimum tax. They feel that the very first thing we need to do is to make certain that, to the greatest extent possible, we protect the safety of each and every American. So while I have no criticism whatsoever of the job that the chairmen of the various subcommittees did in working within the limits that were imposed on them, I feel those limits are ill-advised, shortsighted, and downright dangerous. That is why this amendment is before the House today. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is the amendment that we took to the Committee on Rules. It has not changed one comma, and I want to go through and describe briefly what it does, since we now have more time. If we take a look at the major problems facing us in the area of counterterrorism, we first of all are trying to add $322 million to upgrade State and local health departments and hospitals, so that the next time there is an anthrax attack or a smallpox attack or an attack of any kind, that our local and State public health authorities are prepared, ready, and equipped to deal with it. Right now, the sad truth is that in most communities in this country they are not sufficiently prepared to meet that kind of unexpected threat. We also would expand funding to create additional biosafety laboratories at NIH and Fort Detrick. We only have three level 4 biohazard labs in the entire country. They are heavily taxed right now just dealing with the anthrax scare. They processed some 10 times as many samples over a 1-month period as they normally process in a year. We badly need additional national facilities to handle this potential threat. We wanted to provide $500 million as a downpayment on the $3 billion that the post office believes it is going to need to provide systems to sanitize future mail, so that we do not have to, on a daily basis, worry the way the country has had to worry the last 2 months. Airport and airline safety. We have mandated about $500 million in safety enforcement and upgrades at local airports around the country, but we are providing very little money to help them. We are asking in this amendment that $200 million be provided for that purpose. We are seeking to add $250 million more for cockpit door security, because the committee made the decision to add to the President's request for the number of sky marshals, but they paid for it by cutting the President's request on cockpit security. I do not criticize that choice. If I had to choose between the two, I would have made precisely the same choice as made by the majority, but I do not believe that we should have to choose between those two. I think that both are urgently needed, and we would provide the additional funding for that. We want to help the FBI upgrade its computer capacity, because right now they have a large number of computers that cannot even do pictures. When we are trying to get to the FBI agents all around the country the pictures of the fellows we are worried about who might be future terrorists, it would be kind of nice if the FBI computer system could accomplish that. It cannot right now, to the full extent that it needs to. We would provide money to fix that so that their new computer system would be online by next spring, rather than having to wait until 2004. We provide a wide variety of other law enforcement additions as well. Then we get to the question of weapons of mass destruction. We are trying to add $191 million to try to secure weapons-grade nuclear material within the former Soviet Union, material which on 13 different occasions has fallen into the wrong hands and has been recovered. We do not know how many times that material has fallen into the wrong hands and has not been recovered. So we attempt to deal with that. We also attempt to deal with some grave national security threats at nuclear weapons-producing plants around the country. That is a high- priority item. We try to add 790 additional Customs agents for the Canadian border, so we do not have a sieve instead of a systematic screening at that border. We are trying to provide also additional port security by providing an additional 640 Coast Guard positions for a fully annualized basis, rather than the 6 months that we now have in the bill. We are trying to provide 800 additional Customs Service agents for cargo inspections, because we only inspect 2 percent of the cargo containers that are found in ships that dock at American ports. Secretary Thompson indicated that what worried him most of all was the fact that only 1 percent of our food supply, of the food supply that we import, is inspected. We are trying to raise that to 10 percent. I do not think that is an outlandish request. Then we are trying to take other actions to provide security upgrades for our community water systems around the country, and also trying to enhance the ability of the government to find, hire, and train people in Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, and a number of other languages for which our capacity right now is totally inadequate. So that is a brief description of what this amendment does, with one further addition. It has been said by OMB, the White House budget office, that this represents runaway spending. That is absolute nonsense. I would like to read one sentence in the bill: ``Provided further that such amount shall be available only to the extent that an official budget request that includes designation of the entire amount of the request as an emergency requirement as defined in the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 is transmitted by the President to the Congress.'' What does that mean in plain English? It means that for every single line item in this bill, even though we make it available to the President so that it is there if he needs it in his holster, even though we make it available, he does not have to spend it unless he designates it as an emergency. So if in his judgment it is not an emergency, he still can prevent that money from being spent. I am not comfortable with that, but that is a concession we made to the White House to try to work out a bipartisan approach. I am flabbergasted and appalled that we would even be having this dispute, because what I think should have happened is that instead of summarily rejecting what we wanted to do in this package before they saw word one of what it was we were trying to do, what they would have done had they had some grace, they would have sat down with us and said, ``What is it that you are talking about that you want to do,'' and, ``Where can we agree and where can we disagree?'' Instead, they simply decided sight unseen: ``No more, cannot afford it.'' Well, it seems to me that that is a horrendous mistake. And I think public opinion by a wide margin would want us to provide these added protections that we seek to provide in this amendment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Frost) for the time. Mr. Speaker, the only delay that this vote has anything to do with is Tom DeLay. That is the only delay. We offered on this side of the aisle last week to take this bill up Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday if they would do one simple thing, remove the gag on this House so that we can fully debate the most important domestic security issue that we have faced in at least 2 decades. We have been attacked in what is in essence a second Pearl Harbor. The war abroad appears to be going quite well so far. The problem is we are going after the snake and we are trying to kill it, and they are going to try to retaliate; and they are going to try to retaliate at home as well as abroad, and we have huge, huge security risks, some of which are classified and cannot even be mentioned on this floor. But there are many of them that we can talk about today. All we are asking is to give the President the authority to spend additional money, $7 billion or so. If he does not want to spend the money, he does not have to; but we are asking that we simply be allowed to make it available so that we can do the following things. So that we can help the FBI to develop a new computer system so that it is not in the stone age when it comes to investigating terrorism. We can make their new computer system available by next spring rather than the year 2004 without the amendment. We want to add 800 more Customs agents at the Canadian border. How many people have we heard saying on both sides of the aisle, ``Seal the borders.'' We do not have a sealed border right now. We have a sieve as far as Canada is concerned. We need to correct that. At our ports, only 2 percent of cargo is inspected. Only 40 ships out of 300 that come into our ports every day are fully inspected. We want to correct that problem by adding more and more inspectors in those ports. Food supply: Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Social Services, says the thing that worries him most is the fact that we only inspect 1 percent of the foreign food that we import into this country. We want to raise that inspected percentage to 10 percent. Do you really think that is going too far? Public health: Again Secretary Thompson has said that our public health ability to respond to bioterrorist attack is in ``tatters.'' We are trying to do something about that by adding a billion dollars to increase our capability to defend against all of those agents of terror. That is what we are trying to do. Most importantly, we are trying to do something about the fact that on 13 separate occasions we have had weapons-grade nuclear material fall into the wrong hands in Russia itself, and we are trying to provide money in this bill to see to it that that never happens again. Mr. bin Laden wants to get his hands on that material. God knows what will happen if he does. The essence of the question we face is very simple. Are we going to do something about these threats now because the customs people, the FBI people, they tell us they can use these additional tools now? The question is are we going to give them the tools to use them now or are we going to put a ``Wait-Till-Next-Year'' sign on efforts to defend this country against terrorism? That is what we are trying to do. Member after Member on the majority side of the aisle has come up to me and said, ``Dave, I know you are right, but I cannot vote with you because our leadership is breaking our arms.'' I am asking you to please, instead of consulting your whip, consult your conscience. Vote for what you know this country needs. Not a single dime of this money can be spent unless the President in the ends agrees that it ought to be spent and signs an emergency designation saying it is an emergency. Therefore, you cannot have a runaway budget. Vote your conscience. Vote this rule down so we can do something real to defend the security of this country.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this country is now engaged in a two-front war. In Afghanistan itself, the war in many places seems to be going well. The President, the Pentagon, our intelligence agencies and other agencies are doing their job well. We also have a second war, and that is the war on the home front. In my view, not nearly enough is being done to provide domestic security at a time when we are under attack from terrorism. We have a large number of vulnerabilities. Two weeks ago this Congress passed a tax bill which gave $25 billion in retroactive tax cuts to the largest corporations in this country, repealing all of the taxes those corporations had paid over the past 15 years, retroactively. As a result, one corporation got $1.4 billion in a tax gift. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the White House's budget arm, seemed to think we had plenty of room to afford that kind of giveaway. Yet the Office of Management and Budget, the fiscal arm of the White House, is trying to block, along with the leadership of this House, our ability to even get a vote on an effort to add $7 billion to the security on the home front, that I think we desperately need. We are trying to add additional agents to the FBI, so they can more rapidly and effectively ferret out terrorists and protect the national interest. We are trying to provide additional resources to our public health departments around the country. We are trying to provide a number of additional areas of support. We are trying to cover more than 1 percent of our food supply that comes into this country, because only 1 percent gets inspected. We are trying to do a lot to cover those bases, but I want to talk about one area specifically. This chart represents a day in the life of the U.S. Customs Service. On a typical day, the U.S. Customs Service processes 1.3 million passengers, 2,642 aircraft, 50,889 trucks and containers, 355,000 vehicles, 588 ships, 65,000 entry summaries; and they perform 64 arrests, 223 other seizures, 107 narcotics seizures, and 9 currency seizures. That is part of what these people do for a living every day, all in the service of every American. We have a serious problem because our Customs Service and our Coast Guard do not have enough people in order to secure the borders of the United States. Right now, there are 64 points of entry on the Canadian border which are not open full time. When they are closed, there are two deterrents to illegal entry: One is a little gate with a stop sign, as pictured in this picture, which says ``This port is closed. Warning, $5,000 fine for entering the United States through a closed port. Nearest open port is 70 miles east at portal on Canadian Highway 39.'' This represents our deterrent, along with this: a traffic cone. I do not think it is going to scare many terrorists who want to illegally enter the United States. Yet we are being prevented from even bringing to the floor a measure to try to do something about that. We not only have problems with roads; we have problems with ports. My own major port of Duluth- Superior, for instance, is a port of access in this country. Meanwhile, we have many ports closed; we have hour after hour backup of trucks at other points of entry that are open 24 hours a day. This backup means that many of our American industries are not able to produce fully because they cannot get the materials they need. This is just one of the many security problems we are trying to deal with; and the problem we are facing, I am sorry to say, is that the leadership of this House is preventing us from getting votes on three amendments: one to ensure that our friends in New York get the relief they were promised 2 months ago; the second to make certain that we increase the Pentagon budget in areas thought necessary; and, third, to increase our homeland security. Mr. Speaker, I urge the leadership of this House to allow us to vote on those three amendments. They do not need to vote for them, just allow us to vote on them. There was an amendment today offered on New York which purports to take care of those problems. With all due respect, in my view, any Member of the New York delegation who tries to walk around in public using that as a fig leaf would be arrested for indecent exposure because that amendment does virtually nothing. It gives no political cover; and it should not, because it provides no substantive improvement. I urge the House to allow us to vote on those three amendments. This involves the national security of the United States. We should not be operating under a gag rule. We should not be relying on a traffic cone as a major deterrent on the Canadian border, and that is what we will be doing without the amendment that we want to vote on when we return.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentleman for his comments. I think they are most important and ought to be heard by everyone. Madam Speaker, further reserving the right to object, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from New York (Mr. Hinchey).

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

Mr. OBEY. Reserving the right to object, Madam Speaker, I do not intend to object since I support this continuing resolution; but I rise in order to do a couple of things: first of all, to try to ascertain exactly what the schedule is expected to be around here for the remainder of the week; and, second, to try to focus the attention of the House on the linkage that exists between our need to pass this continuing resolution and our inability to finish bills such as the Department of defense appropriations bill, which the committee has tried mightily to produce as a bipartisan product. I am wondering if the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), under my reservation, I am wondering if he can tell me if he has any idea what the schedule is going to be for the remainder of the week.

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, continuing under my reservation of objection, I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, further reserving the right to object, I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) for his comments. Under my reservation, Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Military Construction.

Mr. OBEY. I am happy to yield to the gentleman under my reservation for that purpose, Madam Speaker.

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, continuing my reservation of objection, I thank the gentleman very much for his comments. Madam Speaker, before I withdraw my reservation, I would like to bring to the attention of the House two additional matters with respect to this matter. I note and I am now reading from a story in the New York Times today which reads as follows: ``Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network held detailed plans for nuclear devices and other terrorist bombs in one of its Kabul headquarters. The Times discovered the partly burned documents in a hastily abandoned safe house in the Karte Parwan quarter of the city, written in Arabic, German, Urdu and English. The notes give detailed designs for missiles, bombs and nuclear weapons. There are descriptions of how the detonation of TNT compressed plutonium into a critical mass, sparking a chain reaction and ultimately a thermonuclear reaction. ``Both President Bush and the British Prime Minister are convinced that bin Laden has access to nuclear material, and Mr. Bush said earlier this morning that al Qaeda was seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. ``The discovery of the detailed bomb-making instructions, along with studies into chemical and nuclear devices, confirms the West's worse fears and raises the specter of plans for an attack that would far exceed the September 11 atrocities in scale and gravity. Nuclear experts say the design suggested bin Laden may be working on an fission device similar to Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. However, they emphasize it was extremely difficult to build a viable warhead.'' The story goes on. That is just one explanation of why the amendment that we seek to bring to the floor after this continuing resolution is approved, why that amendment contains $1 billion aimed at keeping weapons of mass destruction away from terrorists, including the items discussed most eloquently by the gentleman from Texas. I would simply say, Madam Speaker, there has been considerable misunderstanding about what the genesis of this amendment is. Let me simply say, Madam Speaker, that immediately after the need became apparent, the gentleman from Florida and I both instructed our staffs to review all of the agency requests for additional funds that might legitimately be considered by this body in order to strengthen homeland security; and we produced for discussion purposes a document which listed items Tier One, Tier Two, Tier Three, in the order of what people considered to be their importance. Some of them are funded, some of them are not, under the base bill. We feel that if there had not been intervention at a higher level in this institution, I feel strongly that we would have had a bipartisan amendment presented to the committee yesterday and to this House, whenever the bill is considered, which would have had us stand as one, just as we did a few weeks earlier when we passed with no dissenting votes the first down payment of $40 billion that the Speaker played a very constructive role in helping to negotiate. Let me simply say that I understand why our friend on the majority side of the aisle and the committee yesterday could not vote with us on the amendments that we were proposing. I also understand that, in their hearts, many of them would have liked to. I have an observation to make about that which has been, in my view, willfully misunderstood by one person in OMB who attended a meeting in the White House last week and willfully misdescribed to the press since. When I was at the White House, I simply made this observation about Congress as an institution. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the operation of the White House or any other branch of government. What I simply observed was this: When each of us is elected, we come to this body as politicians. All we prove when we win our first election is that we know how to win an election. We then come to this body and seek to become legislators as well as politicians, and that process is furthered by each of us being given a committee assignment. After we are given that committee assignment, we learn the business over which that committee has jurisdiction. Some Members of this House learn it awfully well on both sides of the aisle. The point I was trying to make is that for any legislative body to be a self-respecting legislative institution, there has to be a fair balance between the political requirements that sometimes drive the party leadership of both parties and the substantive legislative requirements that should drive the committees of this institution. In my view, when the leadership of the other party seeks to intervene and shut off the judgment of the committee that has responsibility for the subject matter at hand, there is nothing wrong with that happening occasionally. That is the job of the leadership in both parties. But when it happens routinely, especially on matters this sensitive, then what happens is that this body becomes more and more strictly a political rather than a legislative institution. That is not good for us, that is not good for the country, and that is the point I am trying to make. It seems to me that if the committee had been left to its own devices, we would have had a significantly uncontroversial proposal to make to the House, which would have increased funding for military expenditures associated with the war. It would have added these additional items which I believe are not at all controversial and are badly needed to plug some of the security holes, and we would have also assured that the original commitment made to New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia would have been maintained. That is the purpose of what we were trying to do yesterday. I urge the White House and I urge every Member of this House to, please, before they make up their mind about how they are going to vote on whatever rule is attached to the Defense Appropriations bill, I urge every Member to simply review line-by-line what it is that is being proposed. If they do, I think that you will find that the vast majority of members of both parties would recognize the substantive value of what it is we are trying to do. It just seems to me that that is our job. I also want to point out again, lest anyone think we are trying to ``bust the budget,'' each and every add-on to the homeland security package, each and every item in that bill contains as part of that item the following language: ``Provided further that such amounts shall be available only to the extent that an official budget request that includes designation of the entire amount of the request as an emergency requirement, as defined in the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, is transmitted by the President to the Congress.'' What that language means, Madam Speaker, is that if this money were to be provided, not a dime could be spent unless the President later agreed that each and every one of those items represented an emergency that needed to be funded. If, in the judgment of the President after reviewing our arguments, he decided that spending could wait for another day, that is the way it would be. He would maintain total control over the expenditures. But we believe it is crucial to provide this, because we have talked to the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, to many other agencies of government, and we are convinced that this is necessary for the good of the country. We have stimulus packages floating around here being promoted by both parties. I will not comment on what I think of them. But the fact is that if we want to stimulate the economy, the number one requirement is to restore public confidence in our ability to travel and people's ability to go into public places without fear, and that is what we attempt to do. That could do more to restore economic confidence than virtually anything else this body will do. So I urge each and every Member to review this. And I repeat, we are perfectly willing at any time to grant unanimous consent for that Defense bill to come up today or tomorrow, provided only that we have an opportunity to vote on these three amendments. Surely that is not too much to ask. Madam Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OBEY. That is exactly correct. What we are saying is that we believe that the President needs the added flexibility to have these funds available because of the crisis that we are in; and if he deems any of the items to be nonessential, he simply does not have to designate them as an emergency and that money would not be spent.