Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 10 seconds. Mr. Speaker, despite the fiction we have just heard, we have a letter from the head of the Congressional Budget Office which spells out that the Republican budget so far has eaten into $17 billion of the Social Security surplus. So much for the fiction we just heard. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green). (Mr. GREEN of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Oberstar). (Mr. OBERSTAR asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Speaker, when I first went on the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education as a rookie, Bob Knisely was one of the persons who taught me both about the programs with which we dealt, and about the way the committee worked and how I could be most effective in pursuing the goals that I was concerned about. To this day, I have no idea whether Bob is a Republican or a Democrat. I do know he is a consummate professional. I do know he is a first-rate human being. I do know he is a spectacular public servant. He is one of those people about whom the public will never hear, but he is one of those people, nonetheless, who has helped every day to make things better for working people, who are supposed to be the primary interest of the Department of Labor. He has always given us straight, honest information. He is part of a terrific staff that acts as reality checks on all of us practicing politicians. We like to fit the facts into our rhetoric, but Bob Knisely has been one of those people who has always helped us to fit our rhetoric into the facts. We may not have always been comfortable with that, but that, in the end, is what a professional staffer is supposed to do. I am profoundly grateful for the service that you have provided, Bob, and I am profoundly grateful to the assistance you have given me, and all of us, through the years, and I wish you well in your retirement. Thank you again very much. Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran), who wishes to wish Mr. Knisely well, and to discuss the District of Columbia appropriations conference report.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, it is absolutely correct that I refused to participate in the conference on the Labor-HHS bill, because it was not a conference. The conference is supposed to come after the House passes a bill. We were never given an opportunity to debate this bill on the floor and help shape it. Then we went into a conference controlled by the Republican leadership with a specific instruction about what ought to be provided in that bill, and so I simply said to the gentleman, ``Look, my friend, when the Republicans have determined what they want in that bill, I will be happy to sit down with you and give you an honest assessment of what else you need to do to get a bill that can be supported on a bipartisan basis.'' But I will not participate in a sham. And I do not apologize for that. I am proud of it. Secondly, with respect to NIH, the gentleman from Illinois is a great friend of NIH. There are few better friends in this House than the gentleman from Illinois. But the product today, not through his desire, but because of this silly, phony debate on Social Security, what is happening to NIH is that all but a few hundred million of the $4 billion that we are providing to NIH for new grants will be frozen for an entire year. That will kill people, and that is wrong.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer a preferential motion.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, many of us are against assisted suicide. But, in my view, in an attempt to get at that problem, this bill is a blunder and it pushes us away from added protection for patients. I am for the amendment that is being considered. Because what this bill does is to say that, when a doctor prescribes pain killing agents, the Drug Enforcement Agency could look over the doctor's shoulder and threaten that doctor with 20 years in jail. That is an outrageous Big Brother intrusion in the doctor-patient relationship. Nobody, not government, not religion, not politicians have the right to tell any individual how much pain they have to endure and how it has to be managed. That is my business and my doctor's business. It is not yours or yours or yours or anybody else's. Does anybody really believe that today there is too much bias in medicine toward relieving pain? If they think that is the case, they have not been in many hospital rooms lately. The fact is that today incentives are in the opposite direction to make doctors so careful that they often will err on the side of not enough pain relief. This bill would make that problem worse. That is why I am opposed to it, and that is why I support the amendment.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, let me simply urge the gentleman, those of us on the Committee on Appropriations, such as the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and myself, we will probably have at least a few minutes to review the bill before it is before us. But for the average Member who is not on the committee, I do not want them on either side of the aisle to be in a position where they do not know what the contents of that bill are, since it is the most important domestic appropriation bill that we will handle this year. So I would urge that there be enough time for your folks and ours to be able to review the contents before it is put to a vote.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, that is probably true, I would say. I guess I have no further questions. I would simply observe that I am sorry, but I do not wish the Dallas Cowboys well this weekend.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I asked for 1 minute to inquire about next week's schedule.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, if I could ask the gentleman further, and let me explain first why I ask the question. We have been told for most of the evening that it was the expectation, and in fact I was told by the Chairman of the Committee on Rules earlier this evening that it was his expectation that the Committee on Rules would be filing tonight the District of Columbia new conference report to which they expected to see attached the Labor, Health, Education appropriation bill and that they expected to bring that up tonight. It is now not going to be up tonight. The problem is that we are supposed to have negotiations tomorrow or at least preliminary discussions on a number of the outstanding bills that we still have to pass. It is very difficult to discuss a bill that we do not know the contents of, and without going on any further on that, I would simply ask the gentleman, can the gentleman give us some idea of how much time we will have to examine that bill after it is filed so that everyone on both sides of the aisle is familiar with what they are voting on, since the House has never seen this legislation.

Mr. OBEY. Surely.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the distinguished majority leader.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, if I could ask the gentleman two additional questions. First of all, could the gentleman tell me whether or not he expects to take up the minimum wage bill next week.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for clearing up the question with respect to the Public Law. I think that is a very useful clarification. But I do want to take issue with his interpretation of why we should not have an overall approach to resolve our remaining budget differences. The gentleman said that the majority party does not want to go into an omnibus meeting because last year when they did, we wound up with all kinds of gimmicks. Let me point out that last year, we wound up with $21 billion worth of so-called emergency spending. Now, if spending is called emergencies, under these crazy budget rules, it does not count in total spending. So it is, in fact, hidden. The problem is, this year, without going into those meetings with the President, bills passed by this House already contain $25 billion in emergency spending. So we have already gone far beyond where the gentleman was concerned we would go if we ever sat down with the President. This second chart demonstrates that there are $45 billion in gimmicks already contained in the budgets that have been passed by the majority through this House. My colleagues can see the categories for themselves: $25 billion in phoney designation of the emergency spending, $17 billion that we hide by telling the Congressional Budget Office to pretend that programs are going to cost less than, in fact, the Congressional Budget Office has told us they are going to cost. Then they move billions of dollars into the next year in order to hide the fact that we are actually appropriating it this year. And what we have really done is we have a menu, we have a multiple choice menu. We have column A, which is the OMB, the White House numbers; column B, which is the Congressional Budget Office which we are supposed to adhere to in determining how much money is spent. And instead of deciding one or another, we have picked one from column B, one from column A. They always pick the numbers that are the lowest, and that is the way they hide the fact that they are spending billions of dollars more than we are actually spending. That is why we think we need to get together.

Mr. OBEY. I have a table prepared, Mr. Speaker, by the Committee on Appropriations dated October 15, which indicates that the discretionary budget authority included in the interior conference agreement totals 14,506,491,000 and that the discretionary outlays total 14.523 billion. If these are the correct numbers for this conference report, it appears that the conference agreement exceeds the latest budget authority allocation by $618.491 million and exceeds the latest outlay allocation by $169 million, and that being the case, that is why a number of us are dubious about the wisdom of proceeding with this bill at this moment. The problems within this bill, in addition to some of the others that I will mention in just a moment, another major problem is that we simply do not at this point know where this bill fits into the overall budget scheme. We do know that bills that have passed the House to date have exceeded the President's budget request by almost $20 billion. Given that fact, we know that there is a squeeze on the remaining bills, and at this point, given the meeting that we saw at the White House where we thought there was going to be an arrangement on how to proceed between the White House and Congressional leaders (they being the four-star generals in this place, we being the light colonels), it seems to me it is very difficult even to justify proceeding on this bill when we do not know whether this is going to further add to the excess of spending that is being alleged in the budget process or whether it is not. That is why I raised the question that I just asked of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), because all we know at this point is that this bill exceeds the spending authority which was allotted to it the last time the Committee on Appropriations met under the requirement of the Budget Act. In addition to that concern, Mr. Speaker, I would simply point out the following problems with this bill. It excludes funds for many unique and ecologically important land parcels which can be lost forever to development if they are not purchased now. This bill falls way short of where it ought to be in the Lands Legacy proposal. It rewrites the 1872 mining laws to allow mine operators who are paying next to nothing to extract minerals from public lands to inflict even more environmental damage on those lands. It requires that western ranchers who enjoy the privilege of grazing permits be granted automatic 10-year renewals without completion of the review of the impact of current grazing practices. It includes $5 million not requested by the President to facilitate additional timber sales from the Tongass National Forest. It blocks an Interior Department regulation requiring major oil companies to finally pay something approaching market value for the taxpayers' land that they are pumping oil out of. It has a number of other problems. It rejects any added funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. I would simply say this in closing: None of what I am saying is in any way critical of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) or the distinguished gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula) who chairs this subcommittee. In fact, in that subcommittee, and I am sure anybody who was there will verify this, he tried mightily to prevent some of these riders from being attached. We think that he did make a strong effort. The problem is that we still do not believe that this will meet the standards that would be required to defend the public interest. So for a variety of reasons that I have just listed, we feel constrained to oppose this bill and would hope that by the time it finally becomes law, that it will be in far better shape. I know that if this bill reaches the White House it will be vetoed. The White House has made that quite clear to us and the press. Under the circumstances those circumstances, I think it is ill-advised for this bill to even be here in light of the meeting that took place at the White House. But we have no choice, if the majority is going to bring the bill to the floor, we have no choice at this point to oppose it. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for honestly answering my question.

Mr. OBEY. Right. So at this point that is the latest published allocation to the subcommittee; is that not correct?

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for the time. Mr. Speaker, first of all could I ask the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) a question about this bill. I would like to ask the distinguished gentleman: The latest report on the revised allocations of budget authority and outlays filed by the Committee on Appropriations is dated October 12 and is printed in the House as Report 106-373. That is the 302 allocation. The document indicates that the discretionary budget authority allocation for the Subcommittee on Interior is $13.888 billion and that the discretionary outlay allocation for the subcommittee is $14.354 billion. Is it the understanding of the gentleman that the number I just mentioned, that the numbers do in fact represent the latest target allocations for the subcommittee?