Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I am not asking the gentleman to.

Mr. OBEY. I am starting at the conference agreement that we reached agreement on and shook hands on and toasted with Merlot, as the gentleman knows. I am willing to come down from that.

Mr. OBEY. Let us get in a room in 1 hour and start that process.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield once again, my concern is that the gentleman has just said he does not have the authority to negotiate the top number; and yet it is not my understanding that his leadership, who evidently is retaining control over that top number, it is not my understanding that they will be here this weekend. Now, are they or are they not?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. That is the point that I want to raise. As the gentleman knows, because the gentleman was here last night, and I was here last night, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon all of the leaders on high wanted us to get together last night, first at the staff level so that we understood what each other's proposals were, and then at the Member level. That did not take place, I think largely because there is still such a tremendous lack of clarity coming from the top that it is hard to sit in a room when we are being given three different descriptions of what we are actually expected to do. My question is this. I will certainly be here every day from now until the cows come home, if necessary, to get an agreement. I feel I have full authority on my side at this point to negotiate. I would like to know whether the gentleman yet feels that he has that authority on his side; and if he does not, or if he knows of any other party that does not in this situation, then is the leadership going to be in town over the weekend so that if they want to again second guess our work that they can do that with some speed so we do not have to waste another 3 days and have to come in here and ruin yet another week before we finally get out of here?

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

Mr. OBEY. That is why my margin went up.

Mr. OBEY. No, Mr. Speaker, I do not in any way believe there was an agreement reached at $107 billion. I know absolutely for a fact that there was not an agreement reached. The White House denies that there was an agreement reached at that number. The Democratic leadership denies that there was an agreement reached at that number. There was no agreement at that number. The continuing repetition of the mantra that there was one is one of the things that is going to stand as an obstacle to our getting any progress around here.

Mr. OBEY. If the gentleman will continue to yield, I would like to correct one thing the gentleman said. I do have the authority from my leadership to negotiate all numbers on appropriation items, including the overall amount. And I would respectfully urge the gentleman's leadership to do the same thing on his side. Because the problem I see is that I think the gentleman's leadership and my leadership are starting from different baselines, and so, therefore, they think they are talking to each other but in fact they are talking past each other.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 7 additional minutes. Mr. Speaker, I really believe that, what is happening both on this Labor, Health, Education bill and on the subject that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Traficant) just mentioned is a true test of our priorities, our character, our fairness, and our humanity. We all sit here in comfortable jobs. We fight like the devil to get them. We sometimes pay a heavy physical and emotional price for occupying these jobs because people are often not very fair in their assessment of public officials, and they will use the slightest weakness in any human being and try to use that weakness to define that individual rather than taking a look at the whole. So sometimes politics can be a very discouraging business and sometimes one wonders why one is in it. The answer to me, for myself, is that I came here because I thought this was the place to be more than any other--I never wanted to be a Member of the United States Senate, I never wanted to have any job at all except to be a Member of this House--because this is supposed to be the people's House. This is where we are supposed to be, because we have 2-year terms, we are supposed to be closest to the desires and the needs of the American people. When we come here and cast our votes, these votes are supposed to be about something bigger than just the differences between our parties. There are legitimate reasons to have political parties because we have honest, philosophical, and substantive differences. So we each make a choice about which of those two imperfect vehicles is the best in order to try to put forward the causes we believe in. To me, the glue that holds this country together is our ability to be concerned about what happens to every individual in this country, not just those who are well connected enough with us to be able to get through on a phone call or to grab us on the street and say, ``Dave'', or ``Clay'', or ``Bill'', how are you. When we come here, our priorities are supposed to represent a judgment about who needs help the most. The Labor, Health, Education bill is the bill that is supposed to help meet those shortcomings. We live in a capitalist system, and I think that is the best of any economic system that can be devised. We reward initiative. We reward imagination and hard work. Through entrepreneurship, we see people with talent and drive help build economic opportunities for themselves and for a lot of people who come to work for them in their firms or their businesses. I salute everyone with that talent. But there are a lot of people in this country who need help to get on that train to success. There are a lot of people in this country who need help when they fall off that train, sometimes for bad luck and sometimes for other reasons. We do not meet our responsibilities to those folks when we define ourselves going out the door at the end of this session as commanding cuts in agreements we have already reached in education and in health care. We certainly do not meet our obligations if we do not pass a significant minimum wage, as the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Traficant) has just indicated. We do not meet our obligations if we have not completed action to provide a prescription drug benefit under Medicare. We do not meet our obligations if we do not find ways through a combination of public and private systems to provide decent health care for every person who needs it. The place where we come the closest to meeting those obligations is in this bill, and this is the bill that we are now being asked to shred so we can all go home early. I am not going to do that because I do not want to go through a Christmas season enjoying all of the pleasures of that season, being reminded every day of the opportunity that we took away from people in education, of the mercy help that we took away in terms of health care. I do not think that is what most Members of this House want to do. But if we continue on the course we are going, that is exactly what we will do in the Christmas season. That is exactly opposite of what the Christmas spirit is supposed to lead us all to do. That is why I am voting against this resolution. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. No. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 15 minutes. Mr. Speaker, we are supposed to have our appropriations work done by October 1. We obviously do not have that work done. As I said yesterday, that is not unique. That has happened often in Congress. But I think something unique is happening which, in my view, no longer justifies voting for these continuing resolutions. I do not intend to vote for this continuing resolution, and I will vote against it. Continuing resolutions are supposed to be passed to give us more time to get our work done. When they are passed, we are supposed to be resolving our differences. This is now the 19th time that we have had to come to the floor and ask for yet another extension of time. I would not mind doing that if I thought we really were making progress. I have read several newspaper accounts this morning of the alleged agreements which were reached at the White House yesterday. I have read stories. If I believed that those stories were true, I would then feel fairly optimistic that in fact we could get finished within a few days over the weekend. But in fact what I know to be going on behind the scenes is at huge variance with the newspaper stories that I have seen this morning, so somebody has fed some information to a number of reporters, information which is simply not accurate. I suspect some of that misinformation has been spread by design, but I suspect that some other of it has been spread simply through honest misunderstandings. My interpretation of what is going on at the White House is quite different than the optimistic picture painted in the papers this morning. When I talk to people who are in that meeting, I get wildly varying and differing explanations about what the parties did or thought they were doing. They all appear to be operating from different financial baselines. So that when they use a specific number, when one party in those discussions uses a specific number, two other parties in the room have an erroneous understanding of what that number means. And as a result, we get the picture when people come out of the White House that everybody has played kissy-face, and it is all nice and wonderful, and we are very close to a deal. Yet, when you take a look at the actual differences that are being discussed, we are still miles apart; and I do not believe that passage of this or any other continuing resolution is going to lead to a narrowing of those divisions. I think it will lead to a continuation of the drift, and that drift is in no way the responsibility of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) or anyone else on the Committee on Appropriations. If I may speak institutionally, I believe if the Committee on Appropriations on both sides of the aisle were allowed to work these agreements out, we could do so in 1 day. But so far as I know, there are no clean signals being given that we can, in fact, do that. So I will make a flat prediction. This resolution will pass. It will probably have a majority of votes on both sides of the aisle. And come Monday, we will be here having to pass another resolution because people will have peddled baffle-gab over the weekend without doing very much real work. I compare some of the numbers being discussed in the papers. I see, for instance, that a number of the papers refer to the possibility of reaching agreement for the Labor-Health-Education bill at the level of $107 billion. There is not a chance of a snowball in Hades that you would find a majority of votes in this House for that kind of a bill. And it is important for people on both sides of the aisle to understand that. I am perfectly willing to participate in an exercise which requires flexibility on both sides of the aisle, but I know from talking to a number of my good friends on the other side of the aisle that they themselves would not be satisfied to vote for a bill which came in here at $107 billion. Now, people will say, well, that is the number that the President asked for. Well, if you take a look at what this Congress passed so far this year, it increased what the President asked for for agriculture by $1.3 billion. It increased what the President asked for for Energy and Water, many for Members' projects, by $1 billion. It increased what the President asked for in the Interior appropriations by $2.5 billion. It increased what the President asked for in Transportation by $2.4 billion, and Defense by over $5 billion, but when it comes to Education, we are now being told that we should go back to 106. We just had an election and the standard bearer for the majority party, Mr. Bush, indicated that under Republican governance there would be a bipartisan approach to government, and yet the very first thing that we are being asked to do is to break the bipartisan agreement that was reached on funding levels in the Labor-Health and Education appropriations bill before the election. When that bill came back to this floor, I do not recall a single significant objection to a dollar number in the bill. I do recall some quite vivid controversy, as the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) indicated yesterday, about what were nonappropriation items in the bill, language items that wanted to be attached by one side or the other; and yet today after everyone ran on the idea that this Congress was going to provide the biggest increase in education since the days of Lyndon Johnson, now we are being told that we have to abandon that 22 percent increase in education funding. Well, I would suggest to you that weaknesses in our schools are just as important as weaknesses in national defense. I would suggest that weaknesses in our education system are just as important as weaknesses in our transportation system. I would suggest that weaknesses in education are just as serious as weaknesses in our farm programs. I would suggest that weaknesses in our education programs are at least as important as weaknesses in our locks and dams and river reengineering programs. And yet, we are being asked to cut the efforts to reduce class size in our schools. We are being asked to cut the agreement that was reached on after- school programs so that kids when they leave school have someplace to go besides an empty house, because both parents are working outside of the home. We are being asked to cut back on the promises that we have made in that conference report for special education and for education for disabled children. We are being asked to cut back on the $500 increase in the Pell grants that everyone claimed to be for earlier and that, in fact, Mr. Bush campaigned on. We are being asked to cut back on teacher quality initiatives so that we can reach the ``startling'' situation under which the people teaching mathematics to our kids will actually be trained in mathematics, and the people teaching science will actually be trained in science, and the people teaching history will actually be trained in history. Yet, we are being asked to cut back on those initiatives. We are being asked to cut back on a good many others from the levels reached in that agreement. I am willing to sit down and work out some reasonable adjustments in those programs. But I am not willing to vote for instruments that enable anyone on either side to pretend that we are making major progress when, in fact, we are not. And what is happening is that we are being slow-danced to the end of the session, when we will be given a choice of accepting a simple status quo education budget when, in fact, the situation on the education front demonstrates that is not what we need. We need some imagination. We need some forward progress, and we need a lot more support for some of these initiatives than we have had so far. I really believe that if that original agreement was put on the floor, the dollar amounts I am talking about, absent the language items that were at issue, I really believe that if the dollar amounts for education and health care and worker programs contained in that conference were allowed to come to the floor by the Republican leadership, it would pass with a significant majority, and we would have a lot of votes from both sides of the aisle. That bill is not being allowed to come to the floor. Instead, we are being asked to renegotiate a deal that was reached on both sides of the Capitol with both parties. And as I say, in the interests of rational governance, I am willing to help participate to a reasonable degree, but I am not willing to savage these programs in order to get an agreement. I am not willing to pretend that there is major progress when, in fact, there is not. I want to say again, none of the fault for any of the progress that has not taken place lies at the doorstep of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young). As far as I am concerned, he has been open at all times to suggestions and to requests from everyone regardless of party, regardless of the branch of government. I think the gentleman has genuinely tried to get us to a resolution of this problem, but there are other people. I will be blunt about this. Every time I was asked by members of the press before the election what I thought was happening to the Labor, Health and Education bill, what I said was that I thought that the Republican leadership was trying to, at all costs, avoid a vote on education until after the election, so that they could hide their long-term intention to cut the amounts in this agreement. Then after the election, they would then feel free 2 years in advance of another election, counting on the public's ability to forget that they would then feel free to make large reductions in the education funding programs that we had agreed to. Now that is exactly what is now happening. I do not believe that all Members of the majority party agree with that. I think there is a substantial number of Members who do not want to do that, but they have not been allowed to cast a vote on the floor. And until they are or until we can get reasonably rapid progress, I no longer intend to support these CRs. I have supported 18 of them in a row in order to keep negotiations going, but I see no meaningful progress. I see the leadership of the House and the Senate and the President each trying to compete with each other in public relations terms to show who can be the sweetest in front of the TV cameras or the print press, but I do not see any real decisions being made that reflect the honest view of a majority of people on both sides of the aisle in this House. And so until I do, I will vote no on this and subsequent continuing resolutions. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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 would simply like to note that I have heard a number of Members come up to me and say about this impasse, this cannot go on. I remember Herb Stein, who was the head of the council on economic advisors to President Nixon. I remember Herb Stein saying once in testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, ``People say this cannot go on.'' He said, ``My experience is, if something cannot go on, it stops.'' I would hope that this incessant number of continuing resolutions would stop and that the sparring would stop, and tomorrow we can bring a bill to the floor reflecting the bipartisan negotiations which we have already agreed upon and pass it and end this session.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, to recapitulate, there are a number of appropriation bills which still have not passed, but a number of them primarily because they just got caught up in accidents that started out to happen to somebody else, and we can fix those in about 5 minutes. No problem with those. There are only two real problems left. One is to find some reasonable language compromise on the immigration question, which the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) points out correctly, is not an appropriations issue. The second is to deal with the Labor, Health and Education appropriation conference report. I would remind Members that, when that bill came back from conference, there were objections raised on both sides of the aisle to one language provision in that bill, namely, the language provision that related to ergonomics. I was highly unsatisfied with the results, from my perspective. A number of Members on that side of the aisle were highly unsatisfied with the results from their perspective. But with that exception, I do not recall a single stated objection to any of the dollar agreements in the bill. I do not recall any arguments about any of the appropriation decisions on funding levels. To me, education ought to be the top priority of both parties. I had said consistently in this debate that, if one looks at the history of how different programs were increased as they moved through the process of the education area, that there were some areas such as special education which were Republican priorities. There were other areas that were Democratic priorities. It seems to me, given the realities of the changes in the economic circumstances that we have seen with these larger surpluses available, that the one area that deserves top priority for funding is education; and that if we truly are going to deal in a bipartisan manner, there ought to be room for the education priorities of both parties within the same bill. I think that is the kind of bill that was put together with the help of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Porter) and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) in that conference report. I would still renew my request to the House leadership to allow that bill to come to the floor. I am confident that if they did, there would be enough votes on both sides of the aisle to pass it in a truly bipartisan fashion, and we could, at least so far as appropriation items are concerned, conclude our business on an honorable note. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this is indeed Groundhog Day over and over and over and over again. As I think most Members understand, we were supposed to have our budget work done by October 1. It is not rare that we do not. That has often happened in the history of the House under both parties. What is rare is this difference. In the past, in the main, continuing resolutions which keep the government open after the expiration of the previous fiscal year are passed for the purpose of giving the leadership of both parties and those involved in negotiations an opportunity to have more time to complete their work by resolving their differences. Instead, I am forced to conclude that continuing resolutions in this situation are being used as a tool to shield this institution from doing its work resolving our differences and completing the work needed on the budget for not the coming year but the year that we have been in since October 1. Continuing resolutions are supposed to be used to buy time to find compromises. Yet, we see gross evidence that in fact there are other plans afoot. I do not care if we take a look at the Washington Post today or if we take a look at the Wall Street Journal or if we take a look at the New York Times or if we take a look at the AP report, which I have seen today, we see that the distinguished whip on the majority side of the aisle, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), is in essence counseling that what the majority party ought to do is to push the President into a position where he is forced to choose between shutting down government agencies and accepting what he describes as Republican priorities, including a very large scale-back of education funding which was in the budget agreement which was negotiated and agreed to before the elections but was never brought to the floor by the leadership of the House. I deeply believe that there are the votes to pass that proposal if it can ever reach the floor of the House, but permission to bring it to the floor of the House is being withheld. We are being told that what must happen in order for us to complete our work is that many billions of dollars in education funding which were agreed to in that conference report should now be stripped out of that bill as a price for its passage. Until that happens, we are being asked to pass a series of continuing resolutions a day at a time or two days at a time that slowly click the clock down to the point where there is no time left to do anything to provide this funding for this year. That is why we are now on the 18th continuing resolution since October 1. I would ask those who are urging that the education funding be cut back in the bill that we negotiated, I would ask whether they really do believe that we ought to back away from what I regarded as one of the best achievements of this Congress, a negotiated agreement that provided a 22 percent increase in support for education over the previous year. If Members do not like those increases, I would ask, which ones do they want to cut back? Do they want to see the class size reduction program cut back, so we can slack off on our effort to reduce the size of classes? Do they want to reduce the after-school learning programs that we are trying to ramp up so that children from families with two parents working outside the household can spend the after-school hours in a meaningful learning experience with adult supervision, rather than either roaming the streets or going home to an empty house? Would they prefer that we eliminate some of the funding for the Title I program under which 900,000 disadvantaged students are supposed to receive extra help in reading and math, for instance? Would they propose that we scale back the hard-won increase of $500 per child in the Pell grant program in the maximum grant? Would they propose that we scale back the work study program? Which of these education programs is it in the national interest to scale back on from the amounts that were negotiated on a bipartisan level between both houses of the Congress and the administration? Should we scale back on the efforts to improve the quality of teacher instruction in some 15,000 school districts in this country? Do we really want to have physical education teachers continuing to teach math and English teachers continuing to teach science? I do not think so. Do we really want to scale back on the effort to help huge, humongous-sized high schools redesign themselves into smaller, more intimate learning centers? I do not think we want to do that. It seems to me that we have a majority in both parties that would support that agreement if it could be brought to the floor. I would urge the leadership of the House to allow that agreement to come to the floor. It was negotiated in good faith, and that apparently is what is preventing us from completing our appropriations work. I cannot address the other nonappropriation items that are still at issue in this Congress, but I really believe that if the committee were allowed to do so, we could reach a reasonable compromise on the immigration issue in a very short period of time, and I think that we could produce a majority of votes for an agreed-upon compromise on education funding. But if we are to be confronted by ultimatums such as that suggested by the distinguished minority whip, suggesting that the President should be backed into a corner where he has to accept what the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) defines as Republican priorities or else see a shut-down of an agency's ability to perform, then I think we are in a most destructive atmosphere. I find it ironic that the majority party campaigned and their standardbearer campaigned on the theme that they would pursue a course of bipartisanship, and yet the very first act they are asking us to engage in is to back out of a bipartisan agreement that was negotiated shortly before the election but never brought to the floor for a vote. I would urge that that approach be reconsidered. I, for one, have supported all of these continuing resolutions in the hope that they would give us more time to resolve differences. Mr. Speaker, but when they are simply provided as a tool by which those differences are shielded from being resolved, then I see no purpose in voting for further continuing resolutions. Mr. Speaker, I will vote for this one, but I see no reason to vote for any continuing resolution beyond tomorrow, because we ought to be able to wrap this up in a day or a day and a half. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, let me simply say hello to you and to my good friend, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young). Mr. Speaker, there is nothing very complicated about this resolution, but I think there is something very troubling that lies underneath it. Up until yesterday, I had been fairly confident that the House, if it wished, could come to a conclusion on this year's appropriation bills and finish our work this week, our left-over work from the previous session. I now am feeling much more pessimistic than I was, largely based upon conversations which took place at the White House last night and based upon newspaper accounts of people's comments after that meeting last night. I was originally optimistic because I thought that, when we left, we had had very few differences that actually remained. They were largely focused on two appropriations bills, the Labor-Health bill and the State-Justice-Commerce bill. On State-Justice there was the immigration controversy. And on the Labor-Health, the focus of objection to that bill, which was negotiated on a bipartisan basis and a bicameral basis, the principal objection that we heard when we came back was the language with respect to ergonomics. And that issue has now become moot because those regulations have been published. So at this point, what I think we really face is the question of whether or not there is, as a price for getting our work done, we are going to be asked to in a major way pare back the level of appropriations for items such as education that are now contained in the Labor-Health education conference. Mr. Speaker, we have the votes in both Houses for that Labor-Health and Education conference if the leadership will ever allow it to come to the floor. But so far, it is being prevented from coming to the floor by the leadership. I would simply say that some may remember around here what happened over the past year. For the first 9 months of the year, it was apparent that the majority was intending to provide education numbers which were significantly below where those of us on this side of the aisle felt they ought to be. Then, with the putting together of the conference report of Labor-Health and Education in the closing days of the session before the election, everyone walked out of here and most people on both sides of the aisle campaigned for the funding levels that were provided in that bill. Now, apparently after the election, we are seeing a reversion to form and once again we are being asked to make major reductions in education as a price for having a convenient end to the session. I think that is a price that many of us are not going to want to pay. And that is why I am much more pessimistic that we will, in fact, get the work done that we should be able to get done this week. I find it interesting that the majority party and Mr. Bush campaigned, at least rhetorically campaigned, as those folks who could best bring us together in a bipartisan fashion; and yet the very first thing that we are being asked to do since we have returned, the very first thing we are being asked to do by the House leadership is to in fact walk away from and scuttle a bill upon which agreement had been reached on a bipartisan basis. I do not think that is a healthy way in which to conclude this session. I do not think that is a healthy way in which to begin our relationships for the coming session. But apparently that is the direction that the leadership is most comfortable with. I regret that. And so I will happily support this 2-day continuing resolution in the waning hope that we will be able to reach agreement and get out of here at the end of those 2 days, but I do so with no illusions and no real expectations that the conditions are present for that kind of a bipartisan, early resolution of this session. 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. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I yield to the gentleman from Florida so he might be allowed to explain his motion.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, continuing under my reservation of objection, let me simply say that my understanding is that this CR would continue to keep the government open through Tuesday, December 5. It had certainly been my original hope that since the ergonomics issue, which has caused so much contention between the two parties, has now been issued, it had been hoped that since the objection to that standard is now moot, that we would, in fact, be able to move forward with the Labor, Health, Education conference, the remaining issues in that conference, and also reach a compromise with respect to the State, Justice, Commerce appropriations bill finishing the work of the Committee on Appropriations for this year. It is apparent that the House leadership does not at this point want to release that bill. Under the circumstances, I would agree that there is no point in holding Members here with the unrealistic expectation that something is going to happen over the next week or so on the appropriations bills. I think that under the circumstances, the date for the renewal of the resolution suggested by the gentleman makes sense.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, continuing my reservation of objection, I would hope that come December 5, we can do as I just described so that this lame duck session can, in fact, adjourn before it does too much damage to the Republicans. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.