Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would simply say, with all due respect, regardless of what the rules allow, I think it is simply not fair to raise individual Member's names on the floor and, through innuendo, question what their positions are without informing them ahead of time. I find it most unfortunate. In the case of the gentleman, I find it also to be habitual.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, ``Groundhog Day.'' That is what it feels like to me. Last night, almost the last bit of business we did, we passed a 1-day resolution continuing the government. This morning, because there is obviously not much to do on the floor, we have an early motion to again continue the government for another day. This is ``Groundhog Day.'' How many times have we gone through this now? Is this the seventh time? I frankly have forgotten.

Mr. OBEY. The fifth one. All right. I want to make it clear that I think that the gentleman from Florida has done everything he possibly could to exercise his responsibilities in a responsible manner. And I think that his counterpart in the other body, the gentleman from Alaska, has also done everything he could to live up to his responsibilities. The problem is that they have been under orders from their leadership since day one of this session to peddle a national fiction. And that fiction has been that this Congress was going to spend about $40 billion less than it actually intended to spend. And now having spent 10 months passing bills out of this Chamber that the other side knew were fictions, last week we finally came to fess-up time and last week this House voted to raise the allowable spending levels by about $40 billion. We have been trying to negotiate our remaining differences. We thought 2 days ago that we were very close to closing our differences on the Commerce-Justice bill. But then, for some reason, the leadership decided to throw away a day yesterday. So, despite the fact they were told the President would veto the bill that the House intended to send to him, they decided to ram it at him again one last time. The issues that divide us on that bill are five: First of all, a bill which is supposed to protect our precious coastal land areas from environmental degradation, instead has been turned into a bill which would allow you, literally, to build oil refineries on the sea coast, on the beaches, in the sensitive coastal areas in any State in the Union except Alaska. I am sorry, it would allow it in Alaska too. What it would not allow in Alaska is to have any Federal money spent to deal with the sensitive issue of coastal zone protection. So that is one anti-public interest problem with that bill. The second is that it also contained language which pretended to do something to assure Americans' privacy on the Internet, but in fact opened up holes big enough to drive 65 foot trucks through. There were 20 of our friends on that side of the aisle who voted with us yesterday against that bill, and some of them indicated that that was the reason, and I salute them for it. Then the third issue dividing us on that bill is the question of whether or not we are going to treat immigrants who have been in this country for years equally if they come from countries like El Salvador, as opposed to whether they come from Nicaragua. One Member stood on the floor yesterday and defended the different way we treat those souls by saying in effect, well, it is different if they fled Central America coming from Nicaragua because they were a communist dictatorship, it is different than if they fled Central America to run away from a right-wing dictatorship that we had in El Salvador at the time. I remember that right-wing dictatorship. I remember when there were officials going on television and fingering our own ambassador for assassination. The stories have now come out about how General Vides Casanova and others lied through their teeth to every Congressional delegation that went down there, and lied through their teeth to the press, to their own society, and had full knowledge of the assassinations of Salvadorean citizens that were occurring at the hand of that government and that military. There are some advantages to having been around here for a fair amount of time, because you remember those things, and you take certain lessons from them, and the lesson that I take from that is that if we are to show mercy to people who are in flight from despotic governments, that mercy ought to be even-handed, because you are just as dead if you are killed or assassinated by a right-wing militia as you are if you are assassinated by a left-wing militia. We have seen too much of both in that region. We have got one left that we want to get rid of, and we all know who it is. I do not mean in terms of getting rid of the human being; I mean getting rid of him in occupying the power that he now holds. Then we have another problem with that bill. That problem is that our Federal Treasury has expended billions of dollars over the past generation paying the costs that have been incurred by American taxpayers because of what tobacco products have done to American veterans and to Americans who are now senior citizens. That has cost Medicare and Medicaid billions of dollars, and yet there is language in the State-Justice bill which says that not one dime of funding in that bill can be used to pursue in court redress against an industry that lied to the public and lied to the Congress about the effect of their product. I am one of those people who used cigarettes. I used to smoke three packs a day, at the same time that I worked with asbestos. I did not know, but the company did, that asbestos caused cancer, and I did not know that there was a synergistic effect between asbestos and tobacco, which meant that you have probably a four or five times greater chance of getting mesothelioma or lung cancer, one of the two, one of which our former colleague, Mr. Vento, just died from, there was that much greater chance of dying if you used cigarettes and were exposed to asbestos. Johns Manville knew since 1939 what the problem was on asbestos, and the tobacco companies have known for a long time what the tobacco problem is, and yet the only dollar difference that we had in that bill yesterday between the majority and the minority was whether or not we ought to be able to appropriate a tiny amount of money to pay for the lawsuit that could have the possibility of bringing billions of dollars into the Federal Treasury to help us defray those costs. So the one thing that could have helped increase our surplus, out of all of the things we were doing yesterday, that was knocked out of the bill. Then you get to our differences on Labor-HHS and Education. There we have an argument about what the spending levels ought to be for education. This Congress has spent billions of dollars above what the President has asked in a variety of areas. Some of that I think is defensible, and some is not. But we are now being told, sorry, we are not going to put one dime above what we have already put in the education bill to meet your additional requirements for education. That is what we are being told. So we continue to have an argument about what level of funding we ought to have for special education, for teacher training, for smaller class size initiatives, for school modernization, for Pell and a number of other issues. Then we have the issue that the President is trying to get attended to by this Congress on the issue of school construction as opposed to modernization. There we have a $125 billion backlog. The President is trying to attack 20 percent of that backlog, and so far he is meeting resistance. Then we have the issue of whether or not workers are going to be protected from the dangers associated with repetitive motion injury in the workplace, the single most expensive problem in American industry today, the lost time and the costs associated with repetitive motion industries. This is despite the fact that this committee, the Committee on Appropriations, passed out to the House last year and the House adopted legislation which promised that we would not again delay the efforts of OSHA to promulgate the regulation to protect those American workers. Despite that promise in writing, this House welched on that promise. It is trying to bar going ahead with that provision. Then we have several other issues that still divide us. On that score, the House sent the President a tax bill yesterday which was doomed from the start. It was a blind alley piece of legislation, because the President said he is going to veto it, because far too many of the benefits, again, go to the cream, the folks at the top layers, and all too few of those dollars go to low income people, and the minimum wage hike is being held ransom to many of those rewards. There are a lot of items in that tax bill I do not have any objection to, but there are some that are outrageous. And that bill is a Trojan horse. It is a Trojan horse. So, we are stuck here, passing these one day resolutions, because this House still refuses to come to a compromise mode and work out differences with the White House. So we have no choice but to pass this resolution. But I thought it was important before we relinquished the floor on this issue to summarize what the main issues are, and the main issue on the appropriations side as I see it is still education, education, education. Here I think we have something interesting going on in the country. We have a stealth campaign being run by the other side. This is a Congress under the leadership of our friends on the other side, this is a Congress which over the last 5 years has tried to cut presidential budgets for education by $13.5 billion. Lest you say, oh, we are just talking about increases, they also tried to cut the education budget below previous years' spending levels by over $5.5 billion. On four different occasions they tried to make those cuts in existing spending levels for education. Now, because the polls show that education is an important issue, all of a sudden they have got a presidential candidate out there who is sort of a Trojan horse, who puts a benign face on the party, in hopes that people will look at that genial smile, rather than looking at the record of his fellow party members in this institution over the past 5 years. I think the fight we are having on education now dramatizes, once again, what you folks on the other side of the aisle would really do if you had full power to govern. I think the last 6 years, in terms of you are trying to abolish the Department of Education, in terms of you are trying to cut back on education funding, in terms of you are trying to squeeze every opportunity you could out of the session to pass anti- environmental riders on appropriation bills, it is clear to me that that is what your road map is, long-term. So we are not fighting here about a day or two or three; we are continuing to try to fight for the priorities that we think are important to meet the needs of the American people. We are going to have more than 1 million additional kids in schools over the next decade. We are not doing enough about it. That is what we are trying to correct. And as soon as the majority recognizes that the President is serious on this issue, we may finally have a resolution of those issues. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1\1/4\ minutes. Mr. Speaker, there is nothing partisan about citing the record. The public needs to know if there are any real differences between us, and I think I cited those differences without rancor and with accuracy and without questioning motives. Mr. Speaker, let me simply say that I do find three things strange. Our friends on the majority side brag about the fact that they raised education 50 percent during the time they have controlled the Congress, that is only because we defeated them in their efforts to cut education by huge amounts. We eventually forced them to add $15 billion back to education spending. On prescription drugs, they say they are for prescription drugs. But the record demonstrates they have been trying for a year to block a comprehensive benefit under Medicare and would target their package only to those at the near poverty level. As far as the patients' bill of rights is concerned, their Presidential candidate claimed that he had been in support of the patients' bill of rights when, in fact, as Governor of Texas, he vetoed it, and then the second time around, when his tail feathers were being singed by public opinion, he let it become law without his signature. Mr. Speaker, I think the record is clear on the divisions that are keeping us here. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Gephardt), the distinguished Minority Leader. (Mr. GEPHARDT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

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 ask unanimous consent that I may be allowed to proceed. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw the request.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, recognizing that we have no idea of what will happen to those other bills, I would say we need to have some clarification of that before we know what matters have to be included in the Labor-HHS bill, especially with respect to school construction. The other thing I would simply say in response to the comments of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey) about Mr. Lew. Mr. Lew has been in this city. He has been in this building, prepared to negotiate virtually every day since Labor Day. He has been working 12, 14, 16 hours a day. My colleagues can laugh. My colleagues on the other side can laugh if they want, but he has been here a lot more than any of them have.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from Texas, the majority leader, for yielding me this time. I would just note that I welcome the comments of the gentleman from Florida, although I would say they are at some variance with the fact that we were just told at about 11:30 by one of the key conferees that he did not intend to meet either Saturday or Sunday. I am hoping that that comment was made in a momentary expression of frustration. But, nonetheless, I would like for purposes of clarification to follow up on a question asked by, I think, the gentleman from Texas. We are trying in the conference, we are trying to determine what is going to happen with the Commerce, Justice, State and Judiciary bill and what is going to happen with the tax bill, because that impacts the final negotiations on the Labor- HHS bill. I would like to ask the distinguished majority leader if he could explain to us his understanding of whether and when the Senate is intending to send either of those bills to the White House. Because there are interesting implications for the Labor-HHS bill if the tax bill, for instance, does not go to the White House.

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring to the attention of the House a matter that relates to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Porter) if I could ask the House's attention for just a moment. Mr. Speaker, despite the exchange that just took place, I wanted to take a moment to simply observe to the House that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Porter) will soon be leaving. I do not know when we will have another chance to say this. I understand that he will have difficulty being here tomorrow because of a death in the family. But I wanted to take this opportunity to say that I have served with him for many years on the Committee on Appropriations. All of us has served many years with him in this House. Regardless of the differences on issues that we have, he has graced this House with his presence. He has been an honorable adversary as well as a valuable ally on many occasions. I think he has personified the way that we would like to see all Members of the House conduct himself or herself. On behalf of this gentleman, I simply want to say to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Porter) that we will miss him. We know that whatever he does after he leaves this puzzle factory will be rewarding and constructive. The gentleman has had a long history of concern, especially for issues of medical research and human rights and many others. I for one simply want to wish him all the luck in the world and to say, despite the many disagreements we are about to have over the next 2 or 3 days, that it has been a privilege to serve with him. I think I speak for every Member of the House in saying that.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I will be delighted to yield to the gentleman from Illinois.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, we have no choice but to vote for this CR, as the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) indicates. Before we do, I think we need to simply take note of the fact that these continuing resolutions are supposed to enable us to get our work done so that we can finish the budget for the coming year. I had the impression that what we were supposed to be doing during this time was to be resolving our differences so that in fact the time that we were spending would be spent in ways which would get us all home so that we could get on the campaign trail and occasionally introduce ourselves to our constituents. That would be nice. The problem is that when we go through a day like we have gone through today, we simply wasted an entire day. If the idea is to go home as soon as possible, then today is a perfect example of how not to do that, because the State-Justice-Commerce appropriations bill which is about to come to the floor and the tax bill which has just left the floor are two examples of how we are farther apart from each other than we were when the day began. All I would say is that there is no point in dragging this out. I would hope that the majority party would recognize that rather than sending bills up to the President to veto, it would be better to actually resolve the differences between us. The main issue that still remains between us is the issue of funding for education and the issue of funding especially for school modernization and school construction. I hope that the majority will recognize that we are not going to be going home until that issue is resolved in a reasonable way. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman wants to yield back his time, I am prepared to yield back my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman is going to take a second kick at the cat, I will, too. It is up to him.

Mr. OBEY. All I can say to the House is that if they have listened to him and they have listened to me, or if they have missed what either he or I said, they have not missed much.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, it is getting pretty deep in here. Mr. Speaker, I have already spoken once on this bill earlier today, and I would simply make three points again for reinforcement purposes. The first problem with this bill is that it does not treat human beings equally with respect to immigration. In my view, it continues a vicious discrimination between the way we treat groups from one country versus another country in this hemisphere. That alone is reason enough to defeat the bill. The second reason is that this Congress, it can deny it all it wants, but this Congress has, in my view, for the past 15 years systematically chipped away at the right of privacy for each and every American. I remember when Barry Goldwater, Jr. was on the floor and with myself, we were pushing for legislation to preserve the integrity of the Social Security number so that it would not be used in the beginning steps as an identifier. The last time I looked, Barry Goldwater, Jr. was not a radical, left-wing socialist. We had an agreement between conservatives and progressives and liberals and moderates that that number should remain private and inviolate. This Congress this session has taken several actions that weaken that right; and this bill takes another action today, as the gentleman from Massachusetts has indicated, and for that reason alone, this bill ought to be defeated. Thirdly, this bill started out to provide protection for our coastal lands, our precious coastal lands. Instead, because of its refusal to add one sentence to the bill, one critical sentence, it now guarantees that projects, construction projects in our precious coastal areas will be able to be built even if they do not meet environmental standards. So a bill which started out to protect our coastal areas is now becoming a bill that will degrade our coastal areas. Lastly, we have taken the most important remaining water pollution problem before us, nonpoint source pollution, and instead of giving the States the help they need to work up plans to deal with that problem, this bill provides a piddly $10 million out of a multibillion dollars bill. That is not enough for any State to do the work that needs to be done in order to protect our precious natural resources. Mr. Speaker, I urge, for those reasons, defeat of this bill.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, the distinguished subcommittee chairman, after we have seen the majority try to attach literally dozens and dozens of authorization provisions, he now says, oh, we could not act on the immigration problem because it is an authorizing issue. This committee has been willing to authorize to shred privacy, but it is not willing to authorize in order to protect human dignity. I think that is a telling difference.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, just one other point on this bill. I find it ironic that the only dollar item in this bill over which there is a dispute is the provision which prevents funding for the Government to proceed with a suit against the tobacco companies for past losses to the Federal Treasury due to the use of tobacco. I find that ironic because that small amount of money that the President had asked for could have the potential of bringing billions of dollars into the Treasury to help us pay for the cost of veterans' medical care and to help us pay for the cost of Medicare in general. It just seems to me that is an incredibly short-sighted decision to make. All I would say, in summary, is that the main reason to oppose this bill is that it should not have been brought to the floor in the first place in the shape it is in today. We are trying to resolve our differences and end this session. Instead, this bill exacerbates our differences and extends the session. I do not see how that is constructive. I do not see how that gets our work done. This is a dead-end bill. It is going nowhere. If the Senate passes it, which I doubt, the President most certainly will veto it. All it means is that we have together with what the House has done on the tax bill wasted a full day that could have been used to reconcile differences rather than further emphasize them.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, if Members want to know why they ought to vote against this bill they have more choices than a New York delicatessen. I do not understand what is happening here, because up until 2 days ago we were proceeding on a bipartisan track, and we were going to pass this bill by a good margin. Now that has fallen apart. There are a number of problems with this proposition. First of all, the problem is the lack of fairness in terms of the way it deals with immigration issues. I will not get into that now, but later in the debate there will be people on this floor who will bring this issue to my colleagues in human terms so that they can understand the unfairness and the human pain that is being brought to individual human beings by what this Congress is trying to do. Second, we have the problem of the threat to privacy of every American posed by abuse of the Internet; the ability, for instance, to use Social Security numbers to unlock all of the secrets of the lives of individual Americans. There is a provision included in this bill which will make matters worse than they are today. It is called the Amy Boyer law. She is a young woman who was tracked down by a stalker and murdered, because he was able to get her Social Security number and then find out her place of work, and wound up being killed because of it. This provision in this bill is named for her, but her father is so outraged by the way this has been handled that he is asking that her name not be associated with it in any way. Third, this bill appropriates enormous amounts of money for coastal areas to protect fragile environments. The money in this bill for that provision is 50 percent higher than the compromise amount agreed to in the interior appropriation bill just a month ago. But much of that money will not be used for protection of our coastal areas. It will, instead, be used for the degradation of those coastal areas. After weeks of negotiations, the Senate flatly rejected a request on our part to add one sentence to this bill, which simply said that any funds used for construction in coastal areas be used for environmentally-sound projects. That was rejected. As a result, the prevailing position in this bill is that the majority of money will be used for environmentally-unsound projects. That alone is reason enough to veto this bill. There was also an earlier effort to reach an agreement to provide about $40 million for the most serious remaining water pollution problem we have, nonpoint source pollution. Instead, this bill cuts that $40 million to $10 million and uses every dollar of that $30 million for pork projects in coastal States. I did not know that Kentucky was a coastal State, but it is going to get some money. There are other problems associated with this bill. No money for tobacco litigation. That is going to cost the Treasury millions of dollars. There are five reasons why this bill ought to be rejected, and we will hear more as the debate progresses.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. Mr. Speaker, I want to clear up one thing. It is not that I am objecting to the Stevens amendment. What I am trying to do is raise concerns about how it is going to be applied, whether it will be applied evenly to all bills, including Labor-HHS. Secondly, what I object to is the fiction that, after this cap gets raised to $637 billion, that somehow this Congress expects next year to drop back down to $551 billion. I think that the Committee on the Budget's procedures are forcing this Congress to live under a ludicrous fiction which, in essence, is a public lie which none of us should be participating in.

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