Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. I want to take 30 seconds, Mr. Speaker, to simply say that the gentleman from Florida was absolutely honorable in these negotiations. We disagreed vehemently on a number of these issues. But I know him to be a man of his word. I am uncomfortable that we have to say what we have to say in his presence, because if anyone blew up the deal, it was certainly not his fault. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi).

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I would like to say good morning to my friend, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young). We have been seeing a lot more of each other than we would both like. But I think last night it is safe to say that there was a significant amount of progress. Frankly, there are a couple of items in what was agreed to that I regard as a breach of faith on the part of the House. But I am not going to get into that right now. Basically, the gentleman is right, we made significant progress in dealing with the core Labor H bill. There are still a lot of ways that things could go wrong, but I hope that they do not. I simply urge passage of the resolution. Mr. Speaker, I yield back 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, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, while I am told the Packers lost, my only consolation is I guess the Vikings did too. Mr. Speaker, we are now faced with the need to pass the eighth continuing resolution, I believe, of the year. Well, let me back up and just make an observation. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) said we are here tonight because the President refused to sign any continuing resolution longer than 1 day. Let me respectfully disagree with that statement. We are here because the House worked all year, diligently, and passed all 13 appropriation bills. The problem is that those bills had no attachment to reality. Those bills were fashioned, as they were, in order to allow the majority to continue its pretense that the surpluses would be large enough that we could provide very large tax cuts and still balance the budget and pay down the debt and provide all of the funding that the Congress intended to provide for its discretionary programs. The Congress, in the month of October, at least the House itself, did not finish action on a single appropriation bill, and now we are faced with the necessity to do a year's worth of work in 1 month's time. The reason the President indicated he would not sign continuing resolutions longer than 1 day is because virtually no progress was made for the first month after he had signed a series of longer continuing resolutions, and he felt that it was necessary to try to bring things to a head so that this body would in fact get its work done. Article I of the Constitution gives us the requirement to get our work done on basic things like the budget. The Congress has not done so. There are a number of bills that still have not yet gone to the President's desk. So now we not only are dragging in terms of schedule, but because a whole range of other issues were not dealt with by this House and by the authorizing committees, we now have 313 separate authorization items which we are being asked to include in this bill by various persons within this institution. We are supposed to go through all of those items between 6:30 tonight and 10 o'clock tonight. I am going to let somebody else say with a straight face that they will know what they are doing in dealing with all of those bills. I am one of the four that is supposed to deal with them, and I certainly do not know what all of them are. The good Senator can tell me to stop speaking if he wants, but he is a guest in this House. Let me simply say that I am not going to stop speaking until I have finished my statement. I would simply ask Members to recognize that this is not a responsible way to run a railroad. I hope it never happens again, and I would hope that tonight, as we enter that room, that we have a flexible response from the Republican leadership to the White House offer yesterday to end this impasse. The White House has laid out a fairly straightforward proposition for ending the divisions, at least on the major bill that divides us, the Labor-Health-Education bill. I would hope that we would have flexibility on the part of both sides as we are in those negotiations. Mr. Speaker, let me simply say I regret as much as anyone the fact that Members have to be kept here, but had we had a series of honest appropriation bills and sensible orders from the House leadership to begin with over the first 8 months of this year, all of this chaos would not be necessary. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I do not want to prolong this, because the gentleman and I need to get back to the negotiations, but I do want to respond to one point he said. He has made much of the fact that the majority was so kind and gracious that they gave the minority an opportunity to debate amendments which were not in order. Let me say that that itself is the problem, because the majority used the Committee on Rules to prevent us from offering amendments that would have made those appropriation bills real. They prevented us from offering those amendments because they knew if we brought them to the floor they would have enough Republican support, along with our support, to pass. So, instead of giving us the opportunity to get a vote on items that we thought were necessary, they said, no, we will not give you the right to vote on them. All we will do is give you an opportunity to talk on them for a little bit. So that was the second best option. It was the only option we were given. So I think, in fact, the gentleman's remarks illustrate how arbitrary the majority was in assuring that the minority would never be able to produce amendments that would make these bills real. That is why we are stuck here tonight. The other point I would simply make is that the majority has now passed appropriation bills which have taken these bills billions of dollars above the level of the amendments that we tried to offer that they said were not in order in the first place because they supposedly exceeded the budget resolution. The majority itself has now exceeded their own budget resolution by almost $40 billion. So the idea that somehow we had a real legislative process going on on those 13 bills is a joke. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. The very first rescission action the Republican Congress took when they took control is to try to cut LIHEAP, and the gentlewoman from Connecticut and I blocked it in the Committee on Appropriations. We beat you on that vote.

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. One simple question. The people the President is concerned about have been in this country for 15 years. If the gentleman does not want these people who came from the countries they come from to get the same treatment that prior immigrants got, then the gentleman ought to stand on the floor and repeal the changes in the law that the gentleman's party helped push through in order to allow people from Nicaragua and other countries to get the same treatment the President is now asking for these people. Does the gentleman really want to come here and repeal the law for those folks? If he does not, then he is not for equal justice.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes. Well, Mr. Speaker, so much for trying to keep this debate low key this morning. I think both the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and I tried to do that; but I do not think we succeeded very well. No harm in trying. All I would say in response to what I have heard is that I plead fully guilty in resisting the idea that American prosperity can only be expanded by further suppressing worker wages. In my view, when we try to disallow Davis-Bacon rules, that is what we do. Now, my colleagues may call that big labor bosses, but I call that hard-working construction workers in towns like Wausau and Stevens Point and Superior and Park Falls and Wisconsin Rapids who work physically a whole lot harder than anybody in this Chamber that I am looking at right now, whose bodies wear out a whole lot faster than the bodies of anybody I am looking at right now in this Chamber. Lots of folks wearing suits, very comfortable on comfortable salaries, lecturing unions about how they ought to keep their wages down for their members because they are too inflationary. What a joke. What a joke. I also make no apology whatsoever about wanting to be able to hold HMOs accountable in a court of law if they take actions or require doctors to take actions that injure patients. The rules, as they stand now, say that if a doctor in an HMO follows the rules of that HMO, he can get sued, he can get hung out to dry. But the guy who sets the rules, the board that sets the rules in the HMO, they cannot be sued under many, many of those same circumstances. Why should the guy following the rules get stuck with the lawsuit while the guy who makes the rules gets off scot-free if somebody's health is damaged or if their life is ended? There are a lot of good HMOs in this country, but everybody ought to be held accountable in a court of law when it is required for the sake of elemental justice. That does not have a whole lot to do with the continuing resolution because most of the remarks I have heard on those subjects did not have anything to do with the continuing resolution. But I did want to make clear those two points. I am unapologetic when it comes to supporting higher wages for workers, higher COLAs for seniors and health coverage for workers with repetitive motion injury. I think that government needs to be a big enough umpire to get between Mike Piazza and Roger Clemens in the economy. And the problem is that in the economy, workers usually are not as big and as powerful as the institutions they are up against. We are supposed to be here to help make certain that government is an umpire with enough powers to at least provide an even playing field for those workers. If you want to oppose the Labor-H bill and hold up the Labor-H bill because of our concern on issues like that, be my guest. That again says more about you than it does about us. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. OBEY. Does the gentleman from California see all four of them on the House floor?

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, the gentleman from California named the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Frost). He named a number of other people. It seems to me that, if a Member is going to be attacked personally, that at least they are entitled to know that so that the TV audience does not get the impression that no response was given. The reason no response was given is because several of the gentlemen who were attacked were not even on the floor when the attack was made. I do not think that that suits the rules of the House. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Speaker, this is the second time that the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) has, in my view, questioned the motivation for Members' votes on the House floor. The use of innuendo may be clever, but it is not constructive. The gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) is a good man, and he ought to be able to do better than that. Mr. Speaker, did the gentleman from California tell those gentlemen the he just named that he was going to use those names before he used them on the House floor, knowing they were in a Democratic caucus so they could not respond to him? Does he regard that as the gentlemanly thing to do?

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

Mr. OBEY. No, they were not. Two of them were in the caucus. One of them happens to be the caucus chairman.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I do not intend to take 30 minutes. Let me simply say that the gentleman from Florida is right. We have to approve this resolution again to keep the government open. I am concerned about two developments. Number one, early yesterday it appeared, in fact we were told, that the conference needed to be wrapped up by the end of the day yesterday so that we could have a bill on the floor immediately when we came back to the House on Monday or Tuesday. It will take about 2 days to go through all of the technicalities to do what is called a readout so that everybody's staff is sure of what every item is in that bill, so that at least somebody understands what each item is. So we were told that we should have all the work done Friday. Then, after the meeting reconvened, we were given another schedule, which indicated, for instance, that we would not even be able to resolve the issue with respect to school construction until after the fate of the tax bill is resolved on Tuesday or so. That means that there is a high potential that we will be stuck here not just Tuesday, but Wednesday or Thursday, because if we are not going to be making those decisions until Tuesday, and if we have to go through the usual readout requirement, we could have a real problem. In addition, as the gentleman from Florida says, I do not know exactly how many extraneous items there are on the bill at this point, but if we were to add all of them, many of which I would support if they were on individual pieces of legislation, but if we were to add all of them to this bill, this bill would wind up being longer than the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, and add to it every comic book ever printed in the history of the United States. I think we would have results that were just about as silly as those comic books. So there are going to be a lot of people who are disappointed, because we are being asked by authorization committee members on bill after bill after bill after bill to include this or that provision and some of them are very meritorious, and some of them would fit the needs of my district, some of them would fit the needs of some of others' districts, but we are going to have a very tough time producing a bill that is not the laughing stock of the Western world if we are not very disciplined in terms of what we wind up adding. So I think we will see both the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and myself, and probably the two conferees from the Senate, rejecting dozens of provisions which we ourselves personally favor, simply trying to keep this bill to a manageable size. I would ask for the forbearance of each individual Member who has a hot idea about what ought to be included in the last minute. No question, there are some that are emergencies, and we will have to try to act on them. But this is not going to be an easy weekend, and I would say that my only point of disagreement with the gentleman who spoke, and it is not a disagreement with the way he has tried to perform. The very first bills that he brought to the committee this year were bipartisan in nature. The first three bills that came up in committee could have had this year and last year bipartisan support, but somewhere along the line we all became prisoners of a set of assumptions in the budget resolution that was passed by the House at the direction of the leadership, a set of assumptions which were highly unrealistic and did not at all reflect what, in fact, this Congress intended to spend on these items in the end. That, to me, is the real problem. I just want to say as an institutionalist in this House, I know a lot of us, every time we come to the end of the session, start shooting at the Committee on Appropriations and saying, if only the appropriators could get this done, we would not be in this mess. I honestly believe, if we left it to the appropriators to decide the appropriations issues without extraneous pressures, we could have a deal on all of this stuff in about 3 hours. I really believe that. The problem is that lots of other things are intervening. I would also note that the real problem we have is that when we start with a budget resolution which is not real, that means that we cannot produce real appropriation bills until the budget resolution does get real, and it has taken about 8 months to do that. I will give one example. Lest I be accused of partisanship, I will give one example of how that occurred in the deep dark distant past, in 1981. In 1981, when the budget resolution was before us in the first Reagan year, the last item holding up the conference on that budget resolution was whether or not the agriculture number was real. To meet the targets in the Republican budget resolution, it was decided that we had to cut, I believe it was, $400 million out of agriculture. In order to get the votes to pass that, the grain State representatives were told that that money was going to come out of dairy, and the dairy State representatives were told that the money was going to come out of grain. So we had two false assumptions that were used to pass a number that was unreal. That has occurred many times over on the budget resolution that this committee was forced to operate under this year, and that is why the first 10 months were essentially wasted. So now, our committee is being asked to perform an impossible act and correct 10 months of disingenuousness in about 2 weeks, and that is just almost impossible to do, especially when we are not being given free reign to make the choices that you know would solve the problem. So I hope that we will have a cooperative spirit in the conference, but we are going to have to have some choices made that allow the conferees to actually make some choices, because yesterday, on three successive major items, when we tried to resolve them, we were told, ``Well, we do not have any authority to deal with that; that is going to be made by somebody else.'' If that is the case, it is going to take a lot longer than anybody wants, because the people who we expect to put the deal together, we are told, are not being given enough reign to actually make those choices. That is the institutional problem that I see; and until it is dealt with, I am afraid that we may wind up getting stuck in the ditch, even though on the Committee on Appropriations, both sides would like to make a deal and get the blazes out of here and go home. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, how many men did the gentleman from California name?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes. With respect to the last question, Mr. Speaker, on the, Commerce, Justice, State bill, as I think most people understand, there are five major issues that are dividing the President and the Congress in my view. One of the most important is the privacy issue, the illegitimate use of Social Security numbers to allow anyone who uses the Internet to invade the privacy of each and every American if they are shrewd enough on how to go about it. That is a very serious issue. With respect to the immigration issue, it is important to understand that all the President is asking is that we provide the same rules for people who came from countries like Salvador as we provided at the request on two occasions of members of the majority party, for refugees from Nicaragua and several other Latin American countries. All of these people are here already. There is not one additional person who would come into the United States. You have already made the decision to provide an easier way for people to stay in this country for those people, and we are simply asking that that same principle be applied to others. You are just as dead if you have been killed by the Salvadoran death squads, as you are if you were killed by the Sandanistas. And I think the President is on perfectly good ground. We also have major environmental problems associated with that bill as I think everyone knows. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. I would say that, Mr. Speaker, I have no complaints with the way the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) has dealt with the appropriations Democrats. I think he has been perfectly fair. That does not mean that appropriations bills have been produced with Democratic input, as the gentleman knows, with respect to Justice-State. In the end, the decision was made by the majority leadership to simply put together a package on their own without further consultation with us. It contained a number of provisions which the majority knew were nonstarters with us; and if we had been in the room when those decisions were made, I think we could have avoided the veto that is now going to occur. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. OBEY. I am happy to yield to the gentleman from California.