Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. We just met with the principals and got stiffed. We were just told by the principal from your party on the Senate side I would not move one dollar. And we were asked by the Senate chairman of the Committee on Appropriations to sit down and meet Monday. I expect and I hope that we will find him more reasonable than we have found the principals that we have been dealing with. We had seven meetings with the principals and we have gotten the same thing out of them every time, no movement. That is not the way we are going to end this session.

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

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I am going to vote for the conference report. I think that, after being lost in wonderland territory for over 8 months, that the committee has finally been allowed to be realistic in terms of what our housing needs are, what our scientific research needs are, and what some other basic needs are that are funded by the bill. I also want to congratulate the members on the other subcommittee in the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development for the work that they have done. I must confess some disquiet in supporting that portion of the conference report, not because I object to the work done by the subcommittee, but because we are proceeding in a very strange way. Because of that fact, we are in a situation where we are going to be voting almost $900 million more than the President requested for that bill without having any knowledge of how much we are going to be allowed to provide for what I consider to be even more critical programs such as education and health care. We have been stymied here for months, frankly, over the resistance of the majority party leadership to provide the same kind of financial largesse for education that we are providing in the Energy and Water bill for the Army Corps of Engineers or in some of the other bills that have gone through the place. I would simply say I congratulate everyone for the work they have done on these bills. It is not their fault that the bills are being considered in the context. I want to make that clear. But I do object to having to vote for the kind of package without knowing what the plans are in the end to meet what ought to be the number one priority in the country, education.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) says that the majority gave us a lot of time to talk about issues that concerned us. They gave us a lot of time, but they did not allow us to get any votes on the issues that demonstrated where we wanted to take this country on education, on health care and a whole range of other issues. The gentleman used the Committee on Rules and you used the budget resolution to prevent us from ever having votes on our alternatives while you were free to put yours on the floor. If you want me to change time for votes any time, I would be happy to do that. We would have had much the better deal. Secondly, I would point out, that is consistent with what you have done across the board. You did not give us an opportunity to have a vote on our version of a prescription drug bill under Medicare, so we wound up with your bill of goods rather than our bill being on the floor. On the tax bill, we were not allowed to have a vote on our alternative, so we had to reshape our alternative to fit it into your rules. The fact remains, in the last 6 years they have tried to cut education $13 billion below the President's budgets, and they have tried to cut education below previous year's spending levels by $5.7 billion over that time period, and it has been only because of the fights that we and the White House have waged that we were able to add $15 billion over that period of time to the various appropriation bills for education. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record an insert on Republican attacks relating to education and a number of charts illustrating education numbers:

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would simply say to the gentleman the only difference between his chart and mine is that his chart in the green gives credit for the entire day even if we have only been allowed to be in session for a couple of hours. So the charts are essentially in agreement.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, we are now 6 weeks beyond the deadline for completing our work on the budget. The main reason we are that far behind is not because of what is happening now; it is because for 8 months this Congress proceeded under false pretenses, and the majority party pretended that there was enough room in the budget to pass their gigantic tax package, most of which favored the most well-off and the most privileged among us. Now, one by one, the appropriation subcommittees are finally being allowed to produce bills that reflect in real terms what both parties recognize needs to be provided for science, for transportation, for housing. We finished a bill just a few minutes ago that finally recognized reality. But for 8 months, because of the political pretense that the surpluses were going to be large enough that you could make all of these wild tax promises to everybody, we have proceeded on the assumption that this Congress is going to spend about $40 billion to $50 billion less than it will wind up spending. Now, in fact, ironically, some of the appropriation bills are coming back in excess of the President's request; and some of that is justified, in my view, and some of that is not. But now we have a real problem, because we are down to the last few issues. And, yes, there is an issue remaining on family planning; and, yes, there are a couple of other issues remaining in other bills, but essentially there are very few differences remaining between the majority party and us. The main issue that remains is education, and, to a secondary extent, what we are going to spend on health programs and on worker protection and worker training programs. Mr. Speaker, we have seen a lot of talk in the press about the legislative chaos that has produced the requirement for a series of continuing resolutions. I do not believe that that is the case. I am coming increasingly to believe that these delays are purposeful, and I would like to explain why. This calendar shows in red seven days a week, a normal weekly schedule. This calendar shows in red the times that we have been in session since Labor Day. I want to walk you through it. The week after Labor Day we were in for less than 24 hours. We came in after 6 o'clock on Wednesday and left before 6 o'clock on Thursday. The next week we were in about 48 hours. We came in at 6 o'clock on Tuesday and were gone by that time on Thursday. The next week we were here, as you can see, parts of 4 days, but, actually, in terms of real time spent, about 3 days of work. If you get down to the week of October 2, that is the only week since Labor Day that we have put in a 5-day week here. Do you see what happened last week? We came in late on Tuesday; the week was foreshortened by the unfortunate death of our colleague, Mr. Vento. This week we were in session for a couple of hours yesterday, starting very late in the afternoon, around 5 o'clock, and we will be out of session by sometime between 6 and 7 o'clock tonight. It is a little over a day today, and then people will be at another funeral Friday. I think what this schedule does is to make it easier and easier for the majority party to avoid ever having to face up and actually vote on the issues that divide us on the issue of education. Mr. Speaker, that is what I think is going on, and so now what is going to happen is when this CR is passed to keep the government open another week, what will happen is we will have a brief meeting around 4:00 or 5:00 today in the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education. There may be another meeting after that; but I will tell you something, I have been stuck here, I feel like a fugitive on a chain gang, because as the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Appropriations, I have been here 3 weekends out of the last 4 weekends through the weekend, so has Mr. Lew from the White House. The President has always been a phone call away, and yet while we have been waiting for something to happen, nothing has happened. Why? Because the leadership of both Houses refused to delegate the decision- making power fully to the committee with the responsibility to get the work done, that is the Committee on Appropriations. That is the problem. Well, I will tell you something, I have got some things I want to do in my district, too. I see the leadership going all over the country campaigning for marginal Members. In my view, if I have to stay here, they ought to stay here. So if you want me to stay in town this weekend, I want to know that the Speaker, the floor leader, the deputy floor leader and all of the people making the real decisions are going to stay here, too, but they are not going to. They will be out of town while the appropriators will be stuck here pretending that something real is going on. Now, to me, if you want to get a decision made, delegate it to the people who know how to work it out. If you do not trust their judgment, then stay in town yourselves and sit down with your opposite Members and our leadership and get the job done, but do not ask the appropriators to stay in town to give the rest of the leadership cover while they go off to campaign around the country. If we pass resolutions like this, we are going to be here until next Saturday and probably the following Saturday, and that will get us so close to the election that, in the end, what you will have been able to do is to avoid voting on the issues on education that divide us. That is what I believe the game plan is. That may suit your partisan purposes, but it does not suit the needs of the country or this institution. Mr. Speaker, I am going to vote against this continuing resolution because we ought to have one that makes us be back here Sunday or Monday for everybody to get the work done.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 6 minutes. Mr. Speaker, as I said several times before, the problem with these continuing resolutions is not necessarily the time that is being taken. There have been other Congresses that have not finished their work on time either. But the question is will we do the really important things that we need to do with that additional time, important things that we should have done a long time ago. It is true that over the next week we will pass a few additional appropriation bills. After long delay, we have now reached agreement on some of those bills, so a lot of the controversy has been leached out of them. But in the end, we still face a couple of facts. We face the likelihood that if the House proceeds in accordance with the majority's plans, we will wind up having passed appropriation bills about $45 billion above the level provided in the original budget resolution which the majority party adopted and which has governed virtually all of the turmoil that we have had over the past 9 months on budget issues in this House. It appears that we will also wind up approaching some $18 billion to $20 billion in spending above that requested by the President, much of it for congressional priorities and congressional projects; and yet, as I said earlier, we will not have responded to the major needs still before us in the area of education, we will not see a real prescription drug benefit passed for the American people, and we will not see a meaningful Patients' Bill of Rights passed. We do not want to see this Congress take action on those issues just because they are individually important. We want them all to be dealt with seriously and positively because they are all a necessary part of strengthening the fabric of American society and making this a society that we can all be just a little bit more proud of. We hear talk about the ``end game'' for this session. Reporters ask me every day, what is going to happen with the end game? What is the end game? I would point out that, for the people we are supposed to be helping, this is no game. It is no game for parents who send their children to falling down schools, overcrowded classrooms, in some cases teachers inadequately prepared for the subjects that they are supposed to be teaching and with no place where the kids can safely go at the end of the school day because the school day does not coincide with parents' workdays. That is no game. That for those parents is a serious, serious problem that deserves addressing by this Congress. It is also no game when you run into the senior citizens who I have run into, single women for instance, widows, who may be making about $20,000 a year in retirement on a fixed income but shelling out 12 to 14 thousand dollars of that for prescription drug costs. Those are real cases. And to them this issue also is no game. And they would, I think, like to think that, with this extra time, we would be producing meaningful action on those items. But I do not see the prospect of that happening given the agenda of the majority party, and that is the real futility in continuing to pass these continuing resolutions. So, as I said, in order to keep the Government open, we will support this, but no more resolutions of more than 1 or 2 days. If I had my way, we would not pass anything more than a 1-day continuing resolution for the rest of the year if the work is not done by the time this resolution expires. And I do not expect it to be. So I want to put the majority on notice that we are going to have to operate on a very different set of rules around here if we are going to get things done and get the right things done so we can go home with a straight face and say we have done some really important things for the American people. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of the time to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

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 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 13\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Speaker, what I say is meant in no way to criticize the gentleman from Florida, because he has been one of the few realistic voices on the other side of the aisle trying to point out what the realities are. But the fact is, this is, what, the third continuing resolution that we have had. The budget is supposed to be done on October 1. We are now getting much closer to November 1 than we are to October 1. What have we seen? We have seen bill after bill emerge from conference which have wound up spending much more money than is in the President's budget. Those bills have virtually no relationship whatsoever to the budget resolution which was laid out at the beginning of the year. Yet, we have no real progress in meeting the needs that we feel on this side of the aisle with respect to the most crucial issue remaining in the budget, which is education. We also have seen, although one of the appropriation bills tries to provide a fig leaf on this issue, we have seen this Congress take no action on prescription drugs. We have seen this Congress take no action on the Patients' Bill of Rights. Both of those issues are still pending in one form or another in various appropriation bills. Yet, none of them have any real prospect of being dealt with by this Congress before we adjourn. Now we are being asked to support another week's extension of the deadline for finishing our business. Frankly, I have about had it. I think the White House has, too. I do not expect to stand on this floor and support any further continuing resolutions for more than one or two days at a time. I do not believe it makes sense for us to continue to drift along in this fashion. What I sense is happening is that there is apparently a slow but nonetheless stealthy plan to avoid our ever facing the hard votes on education or on the Patients' Bill of Rights or on meaningful reform of Medicare to include a prescription drug benefit. I do not believe that this Congress should leave this city until we have dealt with all three. I do not say that because these happen to just be pet issues of mine. I say that because America has always been, to me, defined by two things. We have been defined by our passion for individual liberty, and we have also been defined by our determination to see to it that the experiences that we have in this country are shared experiences, and that whether we are in good times or in troubled times, we are all in it together. That is why we have had traditionally such strong support for American institutions and for the American democratic process by each and every one of our citizens. Mr. Speaker, the reason that education is important and the reason prescription drugs are important and the reason the Patients' Bill of Rights are important is because without actions like that, large segments of our population feel that they have been and are being left out of the blessings and benefits of this society. There is no society in the world more blessed than is the society of the United States. We have been given more riches, more natural beauty, more geographic insulation from the trouble spots of the world than any other Nation in the history of the globe. Yet, in my view, this Congress is failing to live up to the traditions of some of the great Congresses in the past in seeing to it that we take these benefits and make certain that everyone has a decent share. The problem that we have, and it is why I voted against the energy bill, for instance, is because that bill spent a lot of money, but it spent it in no context. There are no rules that describe at this point what will be spent or how far we can go in spending. But we wind up, we wind up still refusing to act on the administration's education priorities. Now, the majority party has decided that in two areas of education, they are going to put a significant amount of money. One is special education, and the other is Pell grants. I applaud those two actions. I am fully willing to embrace those priorities. I just wish that the other side would be willing to embrace our priorities. I would call the attention of Mr. Bush to the actions of this Congress. Mr. Bush in debates the past 2 weeks has talked a lot about education, and he has talked about the bipartisan leadership that he would like to extend to this place. I think bipartisan leadership starts by having effective control of one's own party. It seems to me that right now we could use some help from Mr. Bush, because this Congress, while it is providing large amounts of money across-the-board in many areas, is continuing to resist the necessary actions to really make progress in reducing class size, to really make progress in training our teachers, to really make progress in providing a significant number of additional after-school centers so that our young children, if they are in a family where they have two parents working outside the home, so they have someplace to go after 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon where they can be under adult supervision and be in an atmosphere where they can learn. All of these things ought to be embraced by both parties, but we are not seeing them embraced by the majority party in this House. And so I stand here this morning frustrated because we have a lot of rhetoric that tries to place everyone on the side of education, but this Congress, having a record, under the majority party's leadership, having a record the last 6 years of trying to cut billions of dollars out of previous years' expenditures for education. They are now building on that record by trying to block a further expansion of education initiatives that reflect needed national priorities which the administration has taken as its own. To me, that is the major problem with this continuing resolution today. I do not see any purpose in kicking the can further down the road on these continuing resolutions if we are not going to get the two or three major things that we need to get out of this Congress in order to call this a successful Congress; one being education, another being a real, rather than a fictional, attack on the problems of our seniors who need prescription drugs, and the third being the passage of a real patients' bill of rights rather than the passage of a bill of goods that masquerades as a patients' bill of rights. So I will support this continuing resolution, but I do not expect to stand here supporting any further long-term continuing resolutions because, at this point, they do not seem to be doing any good in terms of moving this place forward to recognizing our health care, our Medicare and our education priorities that, above all, this Congress ought to be addressing. Mr. Speaker, how much time is remaining on each side?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes 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. OBEY. Can the gentleman assure us that every bill that has been conferenced will, in fact, be found in the conference report?

Mr. OBEY. I did not think so.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I wonder if I could inquire, can we be assured that next week all of the appropriations conference reports will actually be in the conference reports, or will we again have to go through the charade that we went through today where, if you went to the conference report on the bill passed earlier, you could not find one word of the bill that was being conferenced?

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I would like to vote for this bill. I think in many ways it is a good bill. This subcommittee is run by a very classy guy. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) has been a very good chairman for this subcommittee, and I think everybody in this institution knows it. And the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Sabo) is one of the classiest people who has ever been in this institution, and he has done a fine job as well. But I am going to vote against it, and I want to explain why. I do not need any lectures from anybody about the dangers of drunk driving. When I was in junior high school, I was knocked off my bicycle by a truck driver who had spent 4 hours in a tavern rather than doing what he was supposed to be doing that day. My grandfather was killed in an accident involving drunk driving. So I have had experience with drunk drivers. But I have also had experience with seeing people killed or maimed because of bad highways. I used to live on a two-lane highway, Highway 29, in Marathon County, Wisconsin. A car was demolished simply pulling into our driveway because it was a badly engineered road. If that highway had been modernized, those people would not have been mangled. The problem with this bill is that it sacrifices highway safety in one area because of concern in another area, and I think that is wrong. Now, I do not know what the proper blood alcohol level ought to be, but I do know that if the Federal Government is going to penalize States by taking away highway money that they need to modernize dangerous roads, that then States ought to be judged on the whole array of their laws involving drunk driving, and not just one piece. I want to give some examples. This proposal originated with a Senator from New Jersey. I want to compare my State's record to New Jersey's. Virginia has often been cited as a reason why we should lower the blood alcohol level. But I want to point out, Wisconsin, my State, has a prohibition on open containers containing alcohol in motor vehicles; Virginia does not. On blood alcohol testing, Wisconsin has mandatory testing of all drivers after an accident; New Jersey and Virginia do not. Wisconsin requires mandatory early assessment of drunk drivers to determine alcohol dependency; and it requires treatment, if needed. Virginia and New Jersey do not have those requirements. In Wisconsin, the Department of Motor Vehicles can revoke a license for drunk driving; in New Jersey, only a court can revoke a license for drunk driving, and that takes much longer. In Wisconsin, if you compare the traffic fatality rate between 1975 and 1997, Wisconsin's has improved by 61 percent; New Jersey's has improved by only 45 percent. Yet Wisconsin is being penalized. It is going to lose money because it does not have a .08 alcohol level, and New Jersey happens to have it. The most significant reason that Wisconsin has been able to attack successfully drunk driving is because we have an initiative under which we have a broad-based county-by-county supervision program that oversees drunk drivers in all aspects of their lives. And that has dramatically reduced recidivism. And according to the National Highway Safety Administration, which authorized a study of this, if you have a program like we have, you are 12 times less likely to engage in drunk driving than you are if you do not have that kind of a program. Mr. Speaker, my objection is very simply this: All of us as human beings want to be judged on the basis of our entire conduct, not on the basis of any one little imperfection that someone happens to see. The same should be true of States. We should not take away precious highway aids from States who have done a far better job overall in dealing with the drunk driving issue, just because they happen to not meet somebody's standard of perfection on one narrow item, and that is why the National Governor's Association, The League of Cities, AAA, the Conference of State Legislatures and the International Association of Chiefs of Police all oppose this narrow approach to this problem. I am going to vote against this in protest to the way Congress has looked only at one narrow issue, rather than the whole range of issues in determining what a State's level of highway aid ought to be. I thank the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Sabo) for yielding me the time.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are extremely fortunate to have recruited and retained one of the top occupational health physicians in the country to lead NIOSH over the past six years. As an internationally known authority in the field of occupational safety and health, Dr. Linda Rosenstock's steadfast devotion and visionary leadership have contributed significantly in establishing NIOSH as the model agency for occupational safety and health research. With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that she was recently selected as the new Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, and while the CDC and NIOSH will miss her insightful leadership; young professionals and the public health environment as a whole will benefit in yet another way from her knowledge, hard work, and dedication to the field of occupational safety and health. In her role as Director of NIOSH, Dr. Rosenstock relied greatly upon input from industry, labor unions, academia, government and other occupational health and safety professionals to help guide the Institute in a new direction that would explore the changing nature of our nation's workforce and work environment. Much of this involvement came about through the introduction of the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA), a framework for guiding occupational safety and health research that was developed in collaboration with 500 external partners. This along with the strategic relocation of the health and safety functions of the former Bureau of Mines, and the completion of a new state-of-the-art research facility in Morgantown, West Virginia has brought an annual appropriation increase of $85 million to NIOSH since Dr. Rosenstock's arrival in 1994. Dr. Rosenstock's hard work and dedication to occupational safety and health will long be remembered by this Congress and by the workers in this country who have benefitted from her efforts.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I am sorry to say that this conference report demonstrates that people who too frequently promise regular order should be regarded in the same way that Blaze Starr regarded men who used the phrase ``trust me.'' The process by which this bill is being brought to the floor is truly amazing. The normal process, the legislative process is for both Houses to pass bills. Then we have a conference between the committees representing both Houses. They produce a document, and then each House has an opportunity to vote on that document. If the Senate has adopted amendments out of the normal scope of the conference, then House Members are protected and authorizing committees are protected by having the ability to have a vote on those amendments on the House floor. Instead, this rule today takes the conference report on this bill, and instead of bringing it back as a conference report, it introduces as a new bill the conference report. It then files a report that refers to that conference report. So to figure out what is in this bill, Members do not have to just go and look at the document accompanying this conference report, they have to go look at a second document. It is a two-step operation and it has two convenient results: Number one, it makes it just a little bit more difficult for the average rank-and-file Member to figure out what has been done in the conference; and, secondly, it guts our ability as an institution to deal with subject matters that individual Members, rather than a few power brokers in this House, feel that they ought to have an ability to comment on. Now, this abuse on this bill would be far less disturbing if it were not part of a broad pattern of abuse of the legislative process which is having the effect of depriving the great majority of Members in this institution in both parties from having a real opportunity to play a meaningful role in the resolution of these issues. One Member told me earlier this week that we are evolving into a system in which no more than 30 or 40 people have any meaningful input on the major decisions happening here, and nearly half of those people are staff. That is a sad reality. That means that well over 400 of the 435 Members of this institution are effectively cut out of the process, and that means 400 congressional districts, representing 200 million Americans, virtually have little league say, at best, in the decisions that are made here. And that simply is not fair. In fact, one Member observed to me that, given the way this House has approached appropriation bills for the past year, most Members really do not have to show up in this place for real until October because the institution spends most of its time passing meaningless resolutions trying to nail the people on the other side of the aisle on controversial issues, or else we pass appropriation bills that have no relationship whatsoever to what is expected to finally be in those bills when they emerge as a final product. So we debate political press releases, unfortunately, instead of debating our real convictions on these bills, and that is a destruction of the process that needs to stop. I would note that the reason that this is being done today is simply to get around Senate rules, because we are apparently afraid that an individual Senator on the majority side of the aisle is unhappy with the contents of this bill and wants to read the bill on the floor. Now, the problem is that this House's rules are being destroyed in order for us to deal with the Senate rules as an institution, and the leadership of the House is making that worse. In the Senate, major appropriation bills in the Senate, major appropriation bills involving half of the departments of the Federal Government, were never even taken to the Senate Floor. And we have gotten so far from the regular order that I fear that if this continues, the House will not have the capacity to return to the precedents and procedures of the House that have given true meaning to the term Representative Democracy. The reason that we have stuck to regular order as long as we have in this institution is to protect the rights of every Member to participate. And when we lose those rights, we lose the right to be called the greatest deliberative body left in the world. Last night, for instance, we had, after 2 months of waiting to go to conference because the majority party leadership was trying to decide what the contents of the agriculture bill should be, after 2 months we finally went to conference, after we had a motion to instruct the committee to have a full-blown conference on the Agriculture bill, and we had a very meaningful debate in that conference. But even then, at the end of that conference, we had to have the majority members march up to the leadership offices to find out what their marching orders were for the rest of the conference. Now, I just do not believe that we ought to be proceeding in this manner. And what I find ironic about this is that the very people in this institution and in the House leadership who cry the most about central government power in Washington, are the very same people who are day by day centralizing power in this institution. And that is not only wrong, it is dangerous. There needs to be a happy medium between power that lodges in the hands of individual Members, committees and the leadership. I believe that this incredible centralization of decision-making in the hands of staff in the House leadership offices means that for most Members representing their districts in this body is diminishing every day in terms of their ability to have a say in what goes on around here. And that is the real problem with this rule. I have problems with the underlying bill. I intend to vote against it, and I will explain why during the debate on that bill. But even more important to me is the increasing abuse of process. This House works best when we take advantage of the expertise that all Members have in each and every one of our committees. They bring that expertise to bear. It is leavened by the judgment of the leadership, which is a perfectly appropriate role. But when we wind up having the judgment of the leadership come down like a hammer and prevent committees from doing their work in an orderly manner, and then they prevent individual Members from having a say on nongermane Senate amendments, it reminds me of the fights we used to have when the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Miller) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Brown) and the Republican counterparts, when the Republicans were in the minority, used to raise ``you know what'' because all kinds of nongermane amendments were being offered in Senate and the authorizing committees had no way here to protect themselves. That is why we built in some of these rules and protections. Today they have been stripped away in the name of one word: Convenience. There ought to be a higher standard in this place.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes. Mr. Speaker, the problem we face, as was described by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm), is that we essentially have no idea what the limits are. We had a phony limit that was produced in the original budget resolution in the spring, and the House pretended that it was going to live with the spending limit or discretionary funds laid out in that resolution. But we all know that, for the third year in a row, that understated the reality by about $40 billion in terms of what the Congress would eventually do. Now, following that pretense, for a long period of time this year, we now have been given a new construct by the majority party leadership. They have said, well, under our new 90/10 arrangement for use of our surplus, $28 billion will be available plus $13 billion because they are recomputing the base from which they were operating. That gives us about $40 billion on the table which can be used for tax actions or for spending actions or for entitlement actions. The problem is that that is outlays. We measure the deficit in outlays. But because we do not spend all of the money that we appropriate in any given year, there is a difference between what the committee actually appropriates and what is actually outlaid in any given fiscal year. So because of that difference, what is really on the table is up to $80 billion in additional spending. The problem is no one knows what the plans are for using that huge amount of money. So we are asked to approve a bill at a time. I voted against the Energy-Water bill because I did not know whether we ought to be providing that much money in that bill when we still did not know what the other bills were going to look like. So we are drifting along with no idea of what the limits are, no context, no limits, no discipline, someone in the leadership office having some idea of what the game plan is. That changes from day to day. But we do not know so we cannot tell our constituents, and the press certainly does not know. So in the end, we will do what about six anonymous people in the leadership office tells us will be done, but that is not the way we ought to run a railroad or a legislative body. We ought to be able to know what the limits are so that we can choose within those limits. That is not a privilege which is being afforded us. There is not much we can do about that on the minority side of the aisle. But it is an irresponsible way to run what is supposed to be the greatest legislative body in the world. Mr. Speaker, is the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) going to yield back?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I have no requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton), who sadly has no vote on this floor, but happily, at least, has a voice.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 7 minutes. Mr. Speaker, again, there is nothing new with what we are doing here today. We have in the past had Congresses that have failed to get their appropriations work done on time and so they have required continuing resolutions; that is not the issue. The issue is why we are here on this occasion still in this same crunch, and when you answer that question, you see why this session is different from so many others in the history of the Congress. It is different, because in past years when the Congress failed to get its appropriations work done on time, it was usually because there were honest fights which were occurring over funding levels for programs all the way through, and you had honest fights between honest pieces of legislation. And it was clear what each side in those controversies were trying to do. This year has been different. This year we have seen bill after bill after bill come to the floor initially and each time those bills came to the floor, we were told by the majority leadership, well, we know the bill does not make sense at this point, but this is only the first inning, we will fix it up along the way. Basically, the reason that we are stuck here today and the problem we face today does not have so much to do with what people are now doing or not doing to bring this session to a close, what we are really faced with is the consequences of what was not done in the first 10 months of this session. What was not done was to bring bills to the floor which were a genuine reflection of the intention of the majority party and which were a genuine reflection of what we really in the end expected the Congress to produce in each of the 13 appropriation categories. Those bills essentially were political press releases put out so that the majority party could continue to pretend that there was room in the budget to fund their huge tax packages, the large majority of the breaks in those packages being directed to the most well-off among us in this society. They wanted to continue the fiction they could afford those huge tax packages, also at the same time provide a pay down of debt, a huge increase in the military budget of some $20 billion, although not nearly as much of it went to readiness as the President asked for. In order to maintain those fictions, they maintained the pretense that this Congress is going to spend about $40 billion less than, in fact, it will wind up now spending. So now we are stuck here seeing this institution having great difficulty finding the off button so that people can go home. As I said many times, that is not the fault of the majority on the Committee on Appropriations, they are practical realists. They have tried time and time again to demonstrate what kind of legislation could be passed. And when you deal with legislation straightforwardly and forthrightly and produce legislation which honestly reflects the priorities of the House, then you can pass it with a bipartisan majority on both sides; that was just demonstrated on the previous appropriations bill that we passed today. The problem we have is now after pretending to be fiscal tightwads for almost 9 months, the majority party is now in its rush to go home, now trying to jam a lot of money into a lot of bills in a very short period of time in order to get out of here. But they were still refusing to recognize that of the new money being put on the table, a good piece of that needs to be put in the bill that funds the education, health, social service and worker protection programs in the Federal budget. They are refusing to put money in that bill, but they put billions more in the energy and water bill, and they will put billions more in other appropriation bills as they move through this place. Some of those decisions will be responsible, a good many of them, in my view, will not be. So this Congress has no choice but to vote for this continuing resolution in order to keep the government open. The reason we are in this situation is simply because the product that the Committee on Appropriations was forced by the majority leadership to produce was not a genuine product in the first place. The committee knew that on the majority side of the aisle. The committee knew that on the minority side of the aisle. I think everyone knew that on both sides of the aisle on and off the committee, but for the sake of pretense, this charade has gone on for 10 months, and only now are the real choices being faced and wrestled with. Mr. Speaker, I regret the fact that my friend, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), has to bring another continuing resolution before us. He has no institutional choice, we have no institutional choice but to vote for it if we are to be responsible. But I regret very much the 9-month charade that has preceded what we are now trying to do in the last inning days of the session. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.