Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, the problem with this amendment is that it reverses the fundamental concept of the 1974 budget process. Rather than have Members of each body arrive at a consensus as to how much we ought to spend on discretionary programs, and then allow the appropriations process to sort out how to deal with competing priorities within that amount, it would call for revision of the discretionary spending limits each time the House disagreed with the Senate over spending priorities. This would be a unilateral revision in the budget resolution. Once the House began adjusting appropriations bills, the House and Senate would move from identical limits on discretionary spending to different limits. This would mean the House would send conferees to work with the Senate on working out our differences on the individual bills with constraints so tight as to preclude any real prospect of producing legislation that could be sent to the President. The compromise money would be placed in the lock box. The Senate would have the choice of submitting to the House or rejecting a final agreement. In short, this is a proposal that ought to be supported only by people who believe that we have too few train wrecks in this legislative body. This sounds good on the surface, but it does not work in practice, which is why the Senate has routinely rejected it. It will again. All it means is this bill will be delayed further because of another conflict on another proposal which will go nowhere.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I am not going to comment on the amendment itself directly, but I simply want to say this: I, for one, take exception to the idea that the greatest public service that we do for people is to refuse to use the little resources we have on behalf of the constituents we represent. The size of this economy is growing. There are a huge number of power centers in this economy that have one whale of a lot more power than any individual Member of Congress, virtually every lobby group in society has a greater ability to communicate with our own constituents than we do. I make no apology for the fact that some Members of this institution use all of the resources made available to them under the rules to do their job and most effectively represent the public, and, secondly, to inform the constituents they represent about exactly what is going on out here. I think that sometimes we see this body leave the impression that somehow we are apologetic about what our offices spend in order to do that job. I try to save every dollar that I can, and I regularly turn some money back to the Treasury. But, to me, when I ran a poll a number of years ago and asked my own constituents whether they wanted less or more communication from us, less or more service, the answer came back they wanted more. So, frankly, I regard this as one of those ``holy picture'' amendments that lets Members, very often Members who have the least responsibility and the least impact around this place and who have full reason to turn back a good share of their office budgets, because they make very little contribution to this place and have very little impact on the outcome of the legislative product, they have a good reason to turn back virtually all of their office accounts. But there are a lot of people in this place, in both political parties, who, if anything, need more resources to meet their responsibilities. We are not asking for those resources, but I do question the conventional wisdom that somehow the greatest public good is served if we all do a mea culpa about the fact we are using our resources to try to see to it that the constituents we represent have the most effective representation possible and that we communicate as much as we can with them. I also say very frankly that we do no service to our constituents when we squeeze our own Members' office accounts so much that the average Senator can pay $20,000 more for a legislative assistant than can a Member of the House, when the average Senator can pay $25,000 more for an administrative assistant or a press secretary than a Member of the House can. We do the same work they do. About the only thing we do not do is ratify treaties, and, thank God, because you look at what a hash they have often made of that. But it just seems to me that it is about time we recognize we are being advised literally by ``kiddy corps'' in our offices, because we do not keep people more than 2 or 3 years. You get people who come in at start up levels; and within 2 years, they can make a whale of a lot more money anywhere else than they can on Capitol Hill. This Congress would be less amateurish, it would be more professional, we would have better oversight, we would have a better legislative product if we had many more experienced staffers than we do. So I, for one, while this amendment is obviously going to pass, I question the premise behind it, because it seems to me that it allows Members to brag easily for doing something which very often is not in the interest of their constituents.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his comments. The other problem with it is that we are assigned a specific number under the budget act, and let us say one subcommittee is given a $3 billion allocation, and just because this House takes an action to temporarily cut that bill by $50 million does not mean that the Senate is going to follow suit. If the Senate has another higher level for that same bill, then when we go into conference we will have lost $50 million that the House wants to apply to its priorities and that will make the gap between us and the Senate much larger. And I do not think we want to do that after the experiences we have had the last 2 years in trying to get appropriation bills passed in a speedy fashion. So this amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with party. It has nothing whatsoever to do with ideology. It has everything to do with how much you understand the details of how the budgeting process works. Because if you understand that and if you have ever had to manage a bill on either the majority or the minority side of the aisle, you will understand this is not a workable process.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. Mr. Chairman, let me congratulate the chairman of the subcommittee for working through this compromise. This bill is far preferable to the original bill that was brought to the House. It meets our duty to provide for adequate police protection on the Capitol Grounds. There are still some problems with it because it does not allow the hiring of as many Capitol Police as the Department feels necessary. But it is certainly preferable to the original bill. I would say that there are also some other problems which need to be corrected between now and final passage of this bill. The General Accounting Office will have to impose an immediate freeze and reduce their employment level by 160 people. That is not a good idea because they are supposed to be our watchdog on financial and management affairs, and we are crippling the very agency that is charged with the responsibility to help us save taxpayers' money. The Congressional Research Service accession plan is not funded, and I think that is a serious mistake. There are a number of other shortcomings with the funding level in the Copyright Office and some other areas. I would be willing to support this bill if it stays in the condition that it is right now, but I will not support it if damaging amendments are attached, such as the lockbox amendment, because people need to understand how it works. It sounds enticing to say we are going to have a lockbox and every time you cut money on the floor on an amendment that is going to go in a lockbox and is not going to be used. But under our rules, if you are considering a HUD appropriation bill and you want to cut an item in HUD so that you can put the money into another item in a different appropriation bill, such as education or defense, right now we can do that under our rules. We can cut the money on the floor and then, in conference, that money can wind up somewhere else, either in the same bill or in a different appropriation bill, or it may not be spent at all. But under the lockbox provision, you could not cut money in one bill and expect to try to use it in another. You would be precluded from doing that. That would make our problem in getting conference reports out in a timely fashion immeasurably more difficult and I think it would increase the likelihood that we never finish our budget work. It would increase the likelihood of more controversy and even, God forbid, Government shutdown. So I would urge Members to recognize that sometimes what is underneath the surface is not as pretty as what it would appear to be on the surface.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would like to give an example. The Slaughter amendment that was on the floor last week on the arts, the gentlewoman from New York in an earlier paragraph of the bill tried to cut several million dollars from one account so that when we got to the next paragraph in the bill, she could use that money for another purpose. She was not allowed by the House to consider both items at the same time. So the House first adopted the first half of her amendment, and then had a donnybrook about what would happen to it when we got to the next paragraph. If she had instead told the House that she wanted to cut $22 million out of the Interior bill so that when we came to this bill we could use it for border inspectors, for instance, what that lockbox amendment would say is that we could not transfer that money for that purpose. We could only use it to reduce the amount of spending in that bill, and we could not use it for the purpose which was intended, because our rules prevent us from transferring money from one appropriation bill to another at that point in time. That is the problem with the bill. It means that the legislative intent of the House as expressed by the sponsor, if a majority votes for that amendment, cannot then be carried out in a subsequent bill. That is why the lockbox is a well-intentioned idea but it has a harebrained result, and it does not have diddly squat to do with Medicare and social security, and the gentleman knows it. If he does not, he ought to go back and look at the rules.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, I guess what this rule shows today is that no matter how hard and no matter how many rank and file Members work to try to reach a bipartisan agreement on appropriation bills, that, in the end, the majority party leadership insists on following a practice which will, once again, turn what should have been a bipartisan bill into another dog fight. I see no constructive purpose to be served by that. Secondly, it puts provisions in this bill which are absolutely not germane to this bill. The problem we have is that we have gone through this session and time after time after time, we have been told by the majority party thou shalt not offer nongermane legislative items to appropriation bills. And, yet, this bill does the very thing which we have been lectured on repeatedly and puts in order an amendment which most certainly goes far behind the scope of this bill; that is the so-called lockbox amendment. Mr. Speaker, I have no expectation that I will win this point today, because I know that, especially in an election year, Members, unfortunately a lot of Members, focus a whole lot more on the political look of a proposal than they do on the substantive result. Nonetheless, having the maddening tendency to expect reason and logic to penetrate legislative debate, I am going to make an argument on it, and my point is simply this: Right now, when we pass a budget resolution, that budget resolution gives us a certain number that we are supposed to work off for the remainder of the year in assigning priorities to different appropriation subcommittees. The Committee on Appropriations has to reconcile desires, conflicting desires, to use every dollar in that allocation for a wide variety of purposes, thousands of competing demands for those resources. This amendment will make that process immeasurably more complicated. It will contribute immeasurably to additional delay in the consideration of appropriations conference reports and make more likely both a government shutdown and makes more likely the fact that you will never get your work done. And here is why I say that: Right now if a Member offers an amendment on the floor that cuts a million dollars out of, say, a bomber program in the House, if this provision were in place, that money would have to be put in the lockbox, and you could not then spend it. You could not then spend it for other items in other subcommittee areas. And then let us say the Senate, if the Senate, operating under the same rule, cut a million dollars from another weapons system, that money could not then be spent in conference and yet you would have lowered the overall amount by $2 million, each body would have lowered it for a different item, and you would have no way to reconcile that without cutting other Defense programs that neither House had any intention of cutting. This is one of those amendments that looks terrific if you have never been on the committee that has to work through these compromises, if you have never served on an appropriations conference committee. This is one of those amendments that looks fine on the surface, but when you get into the detail, makes this place an immeasurably more difficult place in which to get our work done. Now, if the majority party leadership thinks that is a constructive thing to do, then it is certainly within their power to impose this decision on the House. But I, for one, having worked for weeks trying to negotiate a reasonable compromise on this bill and having thought that we had done just that until a day ago, I now discover that, once again, we have got a political amendment coming in from left field. It is not a constructive thing to do, and I do not intend to vote for either this rule or this bill if that amendment is adopted.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, with that understanding, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

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

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. OBEY. So what we would agree to tonight is that there would be no further business tonight, that the Waxman amendment would be pending for 40 minutes tomorrow, and that no further amendments would be in order other than those already at the desk, and then tomorrow morning we will work out the remainder of the unanimous consent agreement.

Mr. OBEY. Well, what would be left to decide? I mean, we do not want to keep Members hanging around here another hour while we fine-tune something.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, the Committee on Rules which reported this rule to the House also reported a previous rule to the House under which we debated the legislative appropriations bill today, and the Committee on Rules on that occasion made in order an amendment by the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Ryan) which required a waiver of the House rules. The Committee on Rules is controlled by the Speaker. It could just as easily have allowed a waiver for this amendment. We asked the Committee on Rules to provide that waiver. It did not. So, unfortunately, the majority has used the rules of the House to effectively block me from being able to offer this amendment. I regret that, but that is in fact the reality. So I must very regretfully concede the point of order.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would like to be heard on the point of order.

Mr. OBEY. Just to defend the gentleman from Rhode Island, I would point out, if you look at the spread sheet for this bill, if you look at the line labeled Indian Grants, $21 million requested by the administration. Recommended by the committee, zero. If you look at the line Indian Tribal Court Program, $15 million requested by the President. Recommended by the committee, zero. So I would suggest that while the tribes may be able to receive some assistance from some general block grant, there is, as the gentleman indicated, no specific assistance in the form of the administration's new initiative.

Mr. OBEY. I would simply say I grant that, but nonetheless it does not deny the correctness of the gentleman from Rhode Island who indicated that the administration did have a new initiative specifically aimed at dealing with the problems in Indian country and this bill does not contain the funds that were requested in this bill for that purpose.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. We need to know what is happening with production changes. And the effect that this bill has on our ability to know all of that is decimated because we are cutting the budgets of the agencies that do the statistical analysis to tell us what is really happening. Just one question for example: How do we really tell the price of a product when the nature of that product is being changed every 3 months, as computers are, for instance? The second thing I would like to say is that the fundamental right of any business in an economy is a free marketplace. That is as important to each and every business as the Bill of Rights is to every individual in this country. And yet at the very time that this economy is creating tremendous opportunities, it is also creating tremendous possibilities for anti-competitive practices to go unpunished and unregulated in the marketplace. And this bill makes that problem worse because it cuts the funds that are needed to police the anti-competitive practices of many of those corporations, including, just for one example, the oil companies, which are the subject of so much suspicion today. We have one more challenge; that is the challenge of globalization. How do we compete with countries with different cultures, different economies, and a different understanding about what the rules of the game ought to be? When we do something like pass the China trade bill, as we passed last week, we have an obligation to provide the resources to enforce the rules that we say we are going to hold other nations to, and this bill cuts back on that effort as well. This time is not a time of crisis. It is a time of unparalleled opportunity, if we use our surpluses the right way. If we can restrain the impulse to give tax cuts away to everyone in this society, including those who need it the least, and focus those tax cuts, instead, on those who need it the most, we can have room in the budget to strengthen Social Security, to fill in the gaps in health care, we can strengthen public education, we can assure a competitive marketplace, and we can create a sense of shared prosperity and create a new generation of progress which will stand with us for years to come. The problem with this bill is that it, along with five or six others that we have passed so far, denies us the opportunity to use this precious moment to do what is necessary to knit this country together again in a united fashion for the entire coming generation. That is the failure of this bill, and we will outline those failures as we go through section to section, but that is the failure that has to be corrected before we will support this or any other major appropriation bill.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I hope we can minimize debate on a lot of amendments, and so I would like to get something off my chest early in the process so I do not have to keep popping up and down and offering a dozen amendments to do that. We are at a watershed time in the history of this country. Internationally, our adversary, the Soviet Union, is gone. The Cold War is over. Their conventional military capability has collapsed, and we are facing a new paradigm. In the last century, over 600,000 Americans were killed in combat defending democracy. We fought two world wars and a lot of other big wars. Today, we have a new role. Today, conflicts are likely to be more regionalized, and our job will be to contain those conflicts. And our job often will be to serve as peacekeepers and peacemakers rather than warmakers. That is not going to be neat. It is going to be messy. Some Americans will die. But if we do it right, and if the executive and legislative branches of government cooperate, and if we cooperate with our allies, the price that America winds up paying for participation in world affairs will be far less than the price that we paid in the last century. In my view, this bill gets in the way of that. This bill pretends, for instance, that an appropriations subcommittee can arbitrarily dictate what peacekeeping operations are voted by the Security Council of the United Nations and what peacekeeping operations the United States will support. Now, I do not agree with every peacekeeping operation that has been undertaken, but Congress cannot micromanage those questions. They can participate and they can help with consultation, but they cannot micromanage those without being destructive of our national interest. Domestically, we similarly face a new paradigm. Since 1981, and the first Reagan budget, we have had 18 years of triple digit deficits; and at the same time, the gap between the wealthiest 2 percent of people and everybody else in this society has exploded. Now we have a new situation. We have huge new surpluses instead of huge deficits. This is a precious moment when, with enough vision, we can repair the seams that have held this society together for over 200 years. We can prepare for a new sustained period of economic growth and prosperity, and we dare not screw it up. I would ask the question: With the wealthiest 1 percent of persons in this society already controlling more assets than 90 percent of all Americans combined, will we insist, really, that we are going to provide huge additional tax cuts for those folks; or will we decide, instead, to have better targeted and more disciplined tax cuts so that we have enough left to meet the basic needs of all of our people, including some of those who have been left behind in the area of health care, in the area of prescription drugs, in the area of housing? And are we going to make the needed investments that we need to make in science and in education to make this economy the wonderful arena for opportunity that it can be? We have a third new paradigm in that new economy. We have had an incredible transformation in the way this economy works. The market capitalization of all publicly held corporations has grown in a handful of years from $4 trillion to almost $14 trillion. And in that process the power of some private companies to totally dominate the economy and crush competitor and consumer alike has grown to a proportion we have never yet seen. And whether the issue is gas prices, or whether the issue is in other fields, the question is whether or not consumers are going to be allowed to have the niceties of a competitive market or not. Now, government has an obligation most of all to know what is happening in this economy. We need to know its true size. We need to know what is really happening with price changes.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would just like to emphasize what the Chairman has just said with respect to that one point. If we are to be able to try to work on some kind of unanimous consent agreement at some point, we need to know the full universe of amendments, and what Members' full intentions are. Otherwise, it is difficult to protect those Members, and the sooner we know that, the sooner we can try to meet the demands of the House.

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, we are here today because the committee has underfunded the President's budget request for the National Science Foundation by $500 million. Last year, Chairman Greenspan of the Federal Reserve said this: ``Something special has happened to the American economy in recent years. I have hypothesized on a number of occasions that the synergies that have developed, especially among the microprocessor, the laser, fiber optics and satellite technologies have dramatically raised the potential rates of return on all types of equipment.'' What has happened to the American economy, in my view, has a lot to do with the work of this committee and the work of this subcommittee. If we take a look at the technologies that Chairman Greenspan was talking about, this committee has been largely responsible for funding a number of them through the years, and the results show. If we take a look at the Internet, for instance, in 1985, the National Science Foundation built the first national backbone, the very infrastructure that makes the Internet work today. In 1993, the NSF provided the funding for the development of the first Web browser. The Internet economy will be worth $1 trillion by next year. It employs more than 1 million workers, and it is the engine of our economic growth. Biotechnology. In one of its first grants in 1951, NSF gave $5,000 that helped to establish the very basis of genetic research. Since that pivotal discovery, the field has exploded. Sixty-five biotechnology drugs have been approved by the FDA since that time. DNA fingerprinting. In 1995, using a key NSF discovery which made that technique possible, the Centers for Disease Control was able to stop an outbreak of E. Coli illness because of what they had learned over the previous 10 years. MRI machines. That technology is amazing. It has revolutionized medicine, and that too has grown out of NSF funding. So has the satellite technology that Dr. Greenspan was talking about. Mr. Chairman, I would like to point out that in January of 1992, the Wilshire 500 index, which measures the value of all of the publicly owned companies in this country, stood at 4,337, which means that all of the stocks in those companies was worth about $4.3 trillion. Today, it is over $13 trillion. Just one company, Oracle, the growth in that company alone in the last 12 months has been larger than the total valuation of the Big 3 automakers, Ford, General Motors and DaimlerChrysler. That has been due in significant part to what we have learned through the research funded by NSF. Mr. Chairman, if we want the economy to grow, if we want to expand our knowledge of the problems that face us on the health front, we have to fund NSF to do the basic science that is required. When they do that, they can, in turn, pass it through to the National Institutes of Health who take it a step further, and we can finally come up with discoveries on how to deal with some of the most dreaded diseases in this society. So all it helps to do is to make the economy the engine that it is today. All it helps to do is to help human beings struggle with illnesses that we have fought against for generations. It is well worth the investment. It is extremely shortsighted for this agency to be short cut just so that the majority party can provide $90 billion in tax cuts to people who make over $300,000 a year. That is a wrong priority; this is the right one. I congratulate the gentleman for offering the amendment.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I really do not want to withdraw from the WTO. We need to be there, but I am voting yes out of frustration. There are two problems. At home, the issue is simply whether those in this society, the investing class, the managing elite, the venture capitalists, the multinational corporations who have so much to gain by further globalization will be willing to see a tiny fraction of that increased wealth used to help those who would otherwise be caught in the prop wash of their incredible prosperity. So far, I see very little evidence of that. Internationally, the question is simply, who is going to have a seat at the table? Now, only the voices of the economic elites are heard at WTO. The interests of workers, farmers, and the environment are not adequately taken into account. In fact, the incentives present in the WTO structure on questions of worker rights and environmental protection are in the wrong direction. An economic system without moral foundation is not an economic system at all, it is a jungle. I cast this vote not because I want to withdraw, I do not. I am a committed internationalist. For 10 years I chaired the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. But I am casting this vote to send a signal to WTO and our representatives to it that they have to give more than lip service to the needs of workers, farmers, and the environment. When you do, give me a call. I will be happy to change my vote. Until then, sorry, wrong number!

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would certainly think in a period where Mr. Greenspan and company have begun an upward ratcheting of interest rates, that we would be especially anxious to do these things.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would like to point out also that the pay- fors which the gentleman is trying to use in this amendment in fact help additional families, because the hybrid ARMs provision that the gentleman seeks to use tonight would help about 55,000 more families purchase houses in fiscal year 2001, and reducing FHA down payments for teachers and uniformed municipal employees would again increase the volume of FHA single-family lending.