Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. Could the gentleman also answer another question. Which day does the gentleman expect the Labor Health conference report, which has never been voted on in the House, to be before the House for consideration?

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, let me start by stipulating that the chairman of the subcommittee is one of the finest Members of this institution. I have had the privilege of serving with him for many years, and I think he has graced this body with dedicated service. I think he is thoughtful. I think he is fair-minded, and I think he is a fine chairman of this subcommittee. I wish that the bill that he brought to the floor was of the same quality as he is, because there would be no dispute if it were. Let me simply say that we have heard a number of speeches from our friends on the Republican side of the aisle in which they have feigned surprise at the fact that there is so much opposition to this bill, given the fact that there were so many votes for this bill when it originally passed. I think if we want to understand why that is so, all we have to do is take a look at the motion to instruct conferees which passed this body just a few weeks ago. This House, by a margin of over 20 votes, I believe, on a bipartisan basis, asked the conference committee to do a number of things. They asked us to go to the Senate level on funding for the arts. We did not do that in the conference committee. The conference committee made no compromise whatsoever with respect to the arts and brought the bill back still at the House level. The motion to instruct that was adopted by this House on a bipartisan basis also asked the conferees to strip out all of the anti- environmental riders and, in fact, the conference committee did not. In fact, a number of these riders were not even in the House bill when the House bill passed originally. They were added in the other body. So, again, this conference report does not measure up to the standards that this House set for it in its motion to instruct conferees, and we set those standards on a bipartisan basis with many people on that side of the aisle voting with us, urging the stripping of those riders. That motion to instruct also asked them to drop the provision on mining so that mines cannot continue to go beyond the authority given to them under the 1872 law, in ruining the environment around them. Again, the conference did not drop that provision. So I think we should not be surprised that this House is now going to find many votes opposed to this bill. We are going to be voting against this bill essentially for three reasons. First of all, because the bill in many respects, with respect to the environmental riders is in worse shape than it was when it left the House originally. Secondly, it contains a number of the provisions on these riders which the House asked the conference to strip and which the conference committee did not, in fact, carry out. Thirdly, we feel that the conference report does not sufficiently take account of the opportunities available to us to save precious natural resources by meeting the President's request or something close to it for his Lands Legacy Program. That is all that is involved here. It should not be a surprise. From the beginning, from the get-go, we have known that this bill needed to be improved in order to achieve a large number of bipartisan votes, and under those circumstances, since the House leadership has chosen to bring that bill to us without the improvements that the House itself said it wanted when we first sent the conference committee to conference, we have no choice but to stick by our convictions and oppose the bill at this point. I hope that after it goes down to the White House and is vetoed, the conference committee will take seriously the instructions of the House and take seriously the requests of the President of the United States. And when they do, with the few reasonable compromises, we can have a bill which will indeed reflect the same kind of quality that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula) has reflected in all of his years service in this House.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. They sure are.

Mr. OBEY. Let me say the gentleman has misconstrued what I said. I did not say that this bill had spent too much money. What I said was under the rules of the House, the rules prohibit this bill from being considered at this point because it exceeds the budget ceiling that the gentleman's party assigned to the subcommittee; and, therefore, under those circumstances a vote for this rule is a vote to exceed the ceiling that the gentleman's party itself imposed. What we are suggesting is that that needs to be fixed and a lot of other things need to be fixed, and the only way to do that is to sit down and fix it, rather than send a bill to the President that we know is dead on arrival.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, the two gentlemen who will handle this bill shortly are both good legislators, and I regard them both as good friends of mine. I think that they are bringing a conference bill back to the House which is a far better bill than the one that left the House. I wish I could vote for it, but I cannot. I would like to explain the five reasons that require me to vote ``No.'' First of all, there is not nearly enough money in this bill for the President's top anticrime priority, the Cops on the Street bill. I know that the majority will cite various marginally or unrelated programs to try to pump up artificially the impression that they have put a lot of money in this bill for cops, but the hard reality is that, out of $1.275 billion, that is, 1 billion 275 million dollars, that the President has asked for this program in new money, he is only getting $325 million. That is not enough. He is also not getting the funds he asked for for community prosecutors. Second reason, this bill, in a sense, has walked into an accident that started out to happen to somebody else. This bill tries to fund a lot of worthwhile programs, but it does so with some pretty incredible gimmicks. Example, we have to do a census under the Constitution every 10 years. This bill avoids counting $4 billion in spending under the budget ceiling by designating the census funding as being emergency spending. I guess we did not know that the clock was going to tick and that we were going to run into another 10-year census requirement. There are other gimmicks. We have delayed obligations for the crime victims' fund. We have budget authority which seems to have materialized out of authority. It has really been pulled out from other bills, including Foreign Operations and Labor, Health and Social Services, I suppose, which makes it more difficult to meet those obligations. Thirdly, this bill waives the Endangered Species Act in the case of the controversy involving Alaska salmon. I find that a quaint provision to be in this bill, and I think persons interested in that issue will be startled to find it here. Fourth, this bill resurrects an old debate that was on the Treasury, Post Office appropriation bill. It resurrects an old provision that limits the contraceptive services available to Federal employees in order to try to mollify a Member who was unhappy with the result of the conference on the Treasury, Post Office bill. That has no business on this bill, and I think it will cause considerable controversy because it is attached. Fifth, I would ask my colleagues one question: What do the following six countries have in common, Burundi, Somalia, Iraq, Haiti, Dominica, and the United States of America? The answer is, thanks to this bill, they will all lose their vote in the United Nations. The other five countries have already lost their vote. The United States will lose its vote because, while it appropriates the funds that are necessary to pay our back-due bills at the United Nations, it does not give the authorization to spend those funds until other legislative decisions are made. As we well know, those decisions have been hung up for 2 years. So we have the continued spectacle of a majority party which has an obligation to govern in conjunction with the President, instead, throwing roadblocks in his way when it comes to foreign policy. The same party that blew up the Test Ban Treaty last week, the same party whose leader in the other body, or deputy leader, who told the President, standing 6 feet away from him in the White House, that we had no business engaging in military action against Mr. Milosevic. Then after we had a successful conclusion in that operation, he then went to the press and attacked the President for agreeing to a settlement that left Mr. Milosevic in power. Now, that is the fastest U-turn I have seen in my life in this place. The same party that held up our contributions to the International Monetary Fund at a time we desperately needed to try to stabilize the currency situation in Asia last year in order to protect our own economy. That same party is now saying that we are going to continue to withhold our funds from the United Nations because of an unrelated dispute with the President. That to me is illegitimate, and those are the reasons why this bill is going nowhere. When it leaves here, this bill will be vetoed by the President. When it is vetoed, it will be sustained.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would simply say if the gentleman from Kentucky thinks I launched a tirade against this bill, he has not seen me when I am in a tirade mode. Let me simply say that what the gentleman has just said is incorrect. He says all we can do is provide the money. It is not the money that is holding this up. The committee has put in the money and then it has refused to waive the requirements for authorization, although it has provided waivers for many other authorization requirements in the bill. That is number one point of inconsistency. The second point of inconsistency is simply that then, contrary to what the gentleman said, his own committee has gone beyond the authorization and interposed additional conditions of its own which must be met for the release of those funds, conditions which the gentleman well knows cannot be met, in part because Congress was so obstructive on this matter last year and prevented the United Nations from taking the actions necessary to free up the money.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I would simply say to my colleagues here today, if they feel good about the fact that, under this bill, the United States, the greatest Nation in the world, will lose the right to cast a vote in the United Nations, then, by all means, vote for this bill. If they feel good about denying women who work for the Federal Government access to a full range of contraceptive services, then, by all means, vote for this bill. If they feel good about providing an exemption to the Endangered Species Act for the State of Alaska, then, by all means, vote for this bill. If they feel good about slashing the President's Cops on the Beat program, then, by all means, vote for this bill. I know that the other side will bring in all kinds of whistles and bells and try to suggest that they have funded the President's program adequately. The President does not believe that, which is why, among other reasons, he is going to veto this bill. And most of all I would say, if they believe the fantasy of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) about Social Security, then, by all means, vote for this bill. But keep in mind, when they do that, they will make it more difficult, not easier, for us to resolve the remaining differences between us and they will simply extend the fantasy debate which has plagued Washington for the past 3 years on budgeting. We have seen all kinds of arguments made for all kinds of appropriation bills that have come through this House so far, most of which I have voted against. I would simply say, if they feel good about voting for a bill which will contribute to the ability of this Congress to hide almost $40 billion in spending that it is actually making through gimmicks such as so-called advance appropriations or mislabeled emergencies and the like, then, by all means, vote for the bill. I have come quite accustomed to hearing fantasy spoken on the House floor. I guess one day more will not surprise me. We will hear a lot of fantasy expressed when I sit down; and, under the rules of the House, I will not be able to answer because the other side has the right to close. Just because they have the right to repeat fallacious arguments one more time unanswered does not mean those arguments are true. I think a lot of Members understand that, which is why this bill is going to be vetoed by the President and that veto will be sustained. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Speaker, I find this a very strange debate. The gentleman from New York (Mr. Serrano) and I, for instance, agree on about 90 percent of the issues before this place, and yet today we find ourselves on the opposite side of this bill, and I think we need to ask why. The reason is very simple, in my view. The Republican majority in this House decided that they were going to spend $7 billion to $10 billion more on the Pentagon budget than the President and the Pentagon had asked for. The Republican majority has decided now, in the Labor, Health, and Education budget, to fund a program level which is $2.2 billion above the President. They did that at the same time managing not to fund his education and health and job training priorities. The VA-HUD bill wound up being several billion dollars above the President. The agriculture bill wound up being about $8 billion above the President. The military construction bill wound up being a good amount of money above the President. So the issue today is not whether we on the Democratic side want to spend more money. The issue is simply whether we are going to agree to the labeling of different kinds and categories of spending that the majority party would like so that we can fit it all into the TV ads of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay). That is what the issue is. Now, the Committee on Appropriations, if left to its own devices, could come up with compromises on all of these bills by next Tuesday. The gentleman from New York (Mr. Serrano) knows that, I know that, and I think the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers) knows that. We have always been able to resolve appropriations differences between us. But the problem is that we are also now being asked to do something very different. We are being asked to invent a new system of accounting in order to fit into the TV ads of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay). So I would simply say this, our Republican friends cannot seem to take back even one dime of the spending that they have already voted for. Example: NIH. I happen to be a strong supporter of NIH. But the House bill for NIH contained $1.4 billion. The Senate bill contained $1.7 billion. We are supposed to resolve those differences by coming in somewhere in the middle. The conference at this point is now at $2 billion for NIH. I would submit if our Republican friends cannot compromise on money which they have already spent, if they cannot, for instance, agree to give back the billion dollars that the Pentagon did not want, that they put in the military budget anyway for the ship that the Senate majority leader wanted, if they cannot give back some of that money, then we are going to have to put some additional money into the remaining bills. But we will agree to pay for it, just as the administration found the offsets to pay for the increases that they wanted in the VA-HUD bill. So the question today is not whether we are talking about the Democrats' demand to spend more money. And the question today is not whether or not Democrats are going to be spending Social Security money. The question is how much of Social Security money has the Republican majority in this Congress already committed us to spend. And the question is how do we deal with those issues in an honest way, rather than conducting what Time magazine referred to as ``A $150 billion shell game'' where they said ``This debate over Social Security surplus is more about politics than it is money.'' To me, it comes down to a simple question of honesty. And when we get enough of it, we will get an agreement between both sides; and until we do, we will not.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining on all three sides.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the conference report. It is my understanding that the gentleman from New York (Mr. Serrano) supports the conference report, and given that case, under clause 8(d) of rule XXII, I ask for one-third of the time on the report.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier in debate on the rule, this bill is a lot better than it was when it left the House. Frankly, that is damning with thin praise but it certainly is. There are five basic reasons why this bill is going to be vetoed by the President of the United States. The first is that no matter what accounting schemes are cited by the committee, the fact is that the new funding, new dollars for the President's Cops on the Beat program, and its successor program are only $325 million out of the over $1 billion the President has requested. The universal hiring program, which is the program that all communities will be eligible to try to receive funds from, is funded at a level of only $92 million as opposed to the $600 million that the President is asking for. Secondly, this bill resurrects an old argument left over from another bill on the Treasury, Post Office appropriations, and it renews legislative attempts to place limitations on the kinds of contraceptive services that will be available to Federal employees in their own insurance program. That should not be in this bill. Thirdly, this bill contains an exemption from the Endangered Species Act for the Alaska salmon controversy. That should not be in this bill. Fourth, this bill is part of a huge charade, which is pretending that the Congress is spending billions of dollars less than it is actually spending. Under our budget rules, if we call something an emergency, it then is not counted under budget spending ceilings. We are told that the majority party does not want to sit down in the same room with the President and his negotiators and negotiate an omnibus budget arrangement because they say, when we did it last year, that resulted in $20 billion of emergency spending being jammed into last year's omnibus appropriation bill, in fact, $21 billion, as this bar graph shows. This represents last year's problems which our Republican friends say they want to avoid. But the fact is that, without sitting down for that kind of a meeting, the majority has already produced bills which contain $25 billion in emergency spending, thereby exempted from the budget caps. This bill contains over $4 billion of those phony emergencies, because it claims that the census, which, by constitutional edict, we must conduct every 10 years, this bill claims that the funding for that is an emergency. The budget act says that something is an emergency if it was unforeseen. Well, I did not know many people in this place did not know that the end of the millennium was coming and we would need another census. That is simply a $4 billion device to hide spending and to pretend that we are not over the budget caps. But most seriously of all, this bill is part of a continued onslaught on the part of the majority party in this House, on the President's ability to defend our national interest abroad diplomatically. The Senate last week turned down the comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Now this bill provides the money for us to contribute to the United Nations what we are obligated to contribute, but it does not give the authorization authority to actually provide that money to the United Nations. So it is a let-us-pretend appropriation. What does that mean? It means that, because we cannot actually cut the check to the United Nations under this proposal, we will lose our vote in the United Nations. We will thus be joining Burundi, Djibouti, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Haiti, Iraq, and Somalia as the countries in the United Nations who lose our votes because we did not pay our bills. What a wonderful performance on the part of this Congress. My colleagues really ought to be thrilled by putting the United States in this disgraceful condition.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, I would like to just make three points in closing. First of all, we continue to hear the fiction that our good friends on the majority side of the aisle have not yet ``invaded'' the Social Security Trust Fund. The Congressional Budget Office, as my colleagues know, is the agency that is charged with the responsibility to keep them honest and to keep us honest, on both sides of the aisle. They are supposed to estimate what our actions have cost. If we take a look at their web site and if we print it out, this information will appear on page 13. If we take a look at their web site entitled ``Congressional Budget Office's Current Status of Discretionary Appropriations,'' we will see about two-thirds the way down the page under the title Addendum that, without the gimmicks of directed scoring, which hide at least $12 billion, that we have current status of spending totaling $606.6 billion for appropriation bills. That does not include any of the increases that the conference has put into the Labor, Health, Education bill. That compares to the $592 billion, which is the amount that the Congress can spend without touching the Social Security surplus. That means, in plain English and in plain mathematics, that counting what they have done with the earned income tax credit, they have in their terms ``invaded'' the Social Security surplus to the tune of $14 billion. And if they eliminate the earned income tax credit action, which their side says it intends to do, then they have invaded it to the tune of $23 billion. Now, that is a fact; and all the hops, skips, and jumps that they perform cannot hide that fact. Second, I would simply respond to the previous speaker, who said that the reason that the House is in such a mess on our budget issues is because they only have a few votes above 218 so they have such a narrow margin that it is understandable that they have had to struggle. I would point out that there are 435 votes to be had in this House, not 218. The gentleman from Florida (Chairman Young) correctly recognized that. And that is why on the supplemental which he first brought to the committee and on the first four appropriations bills which he first brought to the committee, we had bipartisan agreements on those bills and those bills were not just going to receive 218 votes, they were going to receive at least 300 votes because a lot of us were going to vote for them. But then what happened is the process got hijacked. It got hijacked by their majority whip, who decided that they were not being confrontational enough. And it got hijacked by the confrontational element in their caucus personified by, among others, the gentleman from Oklahoma. And when all was said and done, they took five bills in a row which started out to be partisan and turned them into partisan vehicles which we can no longer support because they unilaterally made changes in those bills, and they disregarded the President's priorities in the process. In my view, when this is all said and done, there is only one way this is going to be worked out. That is that, in the end, they are going to have to sit down with us and with the White House, they are going to have to give respectful attention to the President's priorities, and we are going to have to give respectful attention to their priorities. That is the only way in the end that adults settle their differences. So what I would suggest we do is pass this continuing resolution, quit the prattle and get on with the process of actually working out those differences.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, the first thing we ought to do is dismiss the piece of fiction that we just heard from my good friend from Florida (Mr. Young). He just told this House that because the Congress could not pass a budget on time back in the 1970s, that it simply added 3 months to the fiscal year. That is absolutely, totally not true. It is interesting to me how people sometimes continue believing in fictions that they themselves have invented if they repeat those fictions often enough, and I think this is one such case. The fact is that what happened in the mid-seventies is that the Congress redrew the entire budget process and when they did that they put into motion a change that would be effective 2 years later, which would simply change the fiscal years which used to run from July to July. They simply changed it to run from October to October because Congress was not getting its budget done in July and August. That is what they did. There was no invention of an additional 3 months, and the gentleman, if he does not understand that, certainly should. Now, why are we here in this charade? We are here because our work is not done. This is not the first time; that is absolutely true. If we are behind, it is not the fault of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young). It is not the fault of the Committee on Appropriations. We are here, in my view, and I am trying to be as unbiased about this as possible, we are here basically for four reasons. First of all, because a budget deal was signed by the President and the congressional leadership 3 years ago which was a public lie. That budget promised that the Congress was going to make across-the-board cuts averaging 13 percent over 5 years' time in real terms. I said at the time that was a public lie, that the Congress would never do that to education or health care or defense, and I think events have demonstrated my criticism to be correct. The second reason we are here is because, as Senator Stevens noted in the conference yesterday, the Congress got behind by 3 months because it was busy trying to impeach the President and drive him from office. So that slowed us down by 3 months. Then we were slowed down another 6 months because our majority friends in the Republican Party tried to pass a tax bill that gave 70 percent of the benefits to the wealthiest 5 percent of people in this country, those folks who make over $100,000 a year, and that huge tax got in the way of our being able to do anything to strengthen Social Security or Medicare or to add to our support for education and health care. It also meant that they had no time to fix Social Security and no time to fix Medicare, something the President asked us to do in his State of the Union message. Then the problem was compounded by the fact that the Republican majority added $14 billion above the amount the Pentagon asked for, first for the supplemental that went through here a few months ago and then in the regular defense bill. Having spent such a huge amount of money on Republican priorities, there was not then enough room in the budget to meet the President's priorities for land legacy, for smaller class size, for the social services block grant, and for cops on the beat and other programs that the President thinks are important. Yet, to pretend that there was enough room in the budget to do all of the things that have been promised, our Republican friends invented some $40 billion worth of gimmicks in their budget to pretend that they are not blowing money like crazy. They invented the 13-month concept. What they are saying is they are going to write checks for $27 billion, but they are going to tell people: ``Do not spend the money until after October 1 so that it will show up on the books for the next year rather than this year.'' That is simply a $27 billion gimmick, which makes the budget look a lot better than it is. Second, they then told the Congressional Budget Office, which is supposed to be our neutral scorekeeper, they have told them: ``Boys and girls, just ignore what you really think these programs are going to really cost and simply tell us in your official bookkeeping that they are going to cost $14 billion less than you think they are going to cost us. So that hides another $14 billion. Then what they have done is they have produced what they call ``emergency'' spending, because under our ridiculous budget rules if we call a program an emergency spending item then that spending does not count under the budget ceilings that we have imposed upon ourselves. In the past, we had gimmicks like that to the tune of about $3 billion a year, and they were primarily for programmatic reasons because there were some programs like the low-income heating assistance where we needed to know a year in advance how much money we were going to spend, so we appropriated a year in advance. But they have converted that advance appropriation device into a device simply to again hide massive amounts of spending, and this small chart I have here demonstrates that while we used to have about $3 billion a year in that hidden advanced spending, in this year's budget that they are recommending we have $27 billion. That sets a new record for irresponsible accounting, as far as I am concerned. Then what they say, after they have done all of that and adopted all of those gimmicks to pretend that the budget gap is much smaller than it really is, then they say: ``Now we are going to jump across it with only a 1 percent cut and we are going to make everything sweet.'' That is like saying you can jump across the Grand Canyon because you define it as only 10 feet wide, but when they jump it is going to be a long fall, and I hope that is understood. Now, what they are doing to cover their tracks is they are inventing this phony argument about Social Security. So the Republican Party that tried to kill Social Security in the cradle when it was first passed by President Roosevelt, the Republican Party that has tried to turn Medicare and Social Security over to the insurance companies by privatizing Social Security, the party that has for years tried to pass tax cuts which got in the way of our strengthening Social Security or Medicare--it in fact took money out of Medicare in order to pay for those tax cuts--that party is now claiming at this late date that it is somehow going to be a strong defender of Social Security. I would like to say I think nothing is more appalling in this debate than the decline in the quality of debate as represented by the Social Security issue. The term ``spending Social Security'' could not be more misleading, and I would like to make a series of points that I do not think many people really dispute in order to show exactly how hollow this whole discussion really is. First of all, no one is proposing spending any of the revenues collected for Social Security on anything other than Social Security beneficiaries, and they know it. If they assert otherwise, they are not telling the truth. Second, the reserves in the Social Security Trust Fund are large and growing rapidly. At the end of last month, they exceeded $850 billion. They are rapidly approaching a trillion dollars. They will be over a trillion dollars before Christmas of 2000. One hundred percent of those reserves are in U.S. securities, and my colleagues know it. Neither party is offering a proposal that would change where we invest our Social Security reserves at any time over the next decade. All Social Security reserves will continue to be invested in U.S. treasuries, and my colleagues know that. This Government ran huge deficits in the '80s and '90s in the non- Social Security side of the budget, and they were so large that the entire budget, including Social Security surpluses, was in deficit. Overall public debt exploded during that period. The best measure of that is that public debt as a percentage of our total national income jumped from 26 percent to more than 50 percent between 1980 and the mid-1990s. That forced us as a country to make huge, heavy annual interest payments that weakened our ability to eventually meet our obligations for a strong defense, for investments in science and education, and to see to it that we would be in good shape fiscally to pay back Social Security when the baby-boomers retired. I want to point something else out. Every budget submitted by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, during the 12 years they held the White House, resulted in deficits in the non-Social Security side of the budget that exceeded the surplus in Social Security trust funds by a wide margin. In 2 years, the Congress appropriated more money than Reagan and Bush requested, but in most years they appropriated less; and overall during those 12 years the Congress appropriated much less than they requested. That means that the on-budget deficits exceeded the surpluses in the Social Security Trust Fund for every one of those years. It means that those deficits can be directly attributed to the budget that they submitted and, again, my colleagues know that as well as I do. In contrast, the budget submitted by this President has caused a dramatic reduction in the size of the on-budget deficits. In fiscal 1998 the on-budget deficit dropped to less than $30 billion. Since the Social Security Trust Fund collected $99 billion more than it paid out in that year, the overall unified government budget ran a $69 billion surplus! Social Security surpluses exceeded on-budget deficits by more than two-thirds in that year. That was the first time that Social Security surpluses were larger than the on-budget deficits since the reform of Social Security in 1980. In fiscal 1999, the story got even better, and it is going to be even better next year. The fact is that when we end the baloney between both parties, what we are going to find out is that we will have over a 3- year period paid down the public debt by over $250 billion, and despite all of the baloney and rhetoric to the contrary, that is the single best thing that will have happened to Social Security since Alan Greenspan and Claude Pepper saved it in the '80s by redrafting several provisions of the program. So go ahead and cover the tracks if my colleagues want, or try as hard as they can. The fact is that the numbers indicate that good things, not bad things, are happening to Social Security. It has taken a long time for us to turn the corner on deficits; and what we ought to be doing is explaining to the American people in an honest way how we have gotten here and how we can make the situation even better rather than pretending that a crisis exists when, in fact, there is not one.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Mr. Speaker, what is important is not what happened yesterday, it is what should happen today and tomorrow. But before I get to that, I just want to address one comment made by my good friend, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), in comparing who has done what in achieving previous completion on budget action. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) has pointed with great pride to what happened in fiscal year 1997 as proof that in those days the Republican majority finished all of its bills on time. That is, in fact, the reverse of what happened. What happened in 1997 is that they had a huge train wreck early and the damage was so bad that they simply gave up trying to legislate normally. If we read the Congressional Quarterly account of what happened that year, I assume people think that is a neutral account, we will see in the 1996 almanac on page 10-21 that Congressional Quarterly indicates that ``When Republicans returned from their August break after Labor Day, it was far from clear how or whether they could get their spending bills enacted by the start of the fiscal year. ``At that point only one fiscal 1997 spending bill, for agriculture, had become law. GOP troubles extended beyond deep disagreements with Clinton. For one thing, Republicans had difficulty among themselves settling on a game plan.'' It goes on to discuss what happened, and what happened was very simply this: Five appropriation bills never went to conference. Those five bills wound up being wrapped into one overall omnibus appropriation, the base bill of which was the defense bill. What happened is the Republican majority, in the words of CQ, was so anxious to get home for reelection that they simply wrapped it all up in a one big huge package and went home. To call that a model of orderly process is indeed turning reality on its head. I just wanted to bring that to the attention of the House. We have a problem here. I think that problem is rooted in two factors. Number one, we have had the Republican majority fashion most of their appropriation bills in such a way that it would allow them to pretend this year that they had room for a giant tax cut, and they went home in August and found out that the public understood that that in fact was not the case, the public had other priorities, such as education, fixing Social Security and fixing Medicare. Yet what has happened is because this House spent so much time trying to pass that tax bill, we have appropriation bills that still have not become law. Secondly, we are operating under a budget agreement in 1997 that in my view was the largest public fib in the history of this Congress, going back to 1981 when we had another very large public fib on budgeting. The problem is that 1997 deal promised that this Congress was going to make reductions in spending that it in fact has never been willing to make under the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. And as a result what has happened is that today we are struggling under a massive fiction. That massive fiction is that we have spent about $40 billion less than we have actually spent in the appropriation bills. And so now, in a desperate effort to cover up that fact, the House leadership is trying to divert attention to a phony Social Security debate that does not in fact exist in the real world. In my view we have two choices: We can continue to pass continuing resolutions once a week that are monuments to our own impotence, or we can simply get down to business and decide we are going to toss aside the phoniness and the fiction and get to the reality. The reality is not have we met each other's accounting standards. The reality is not how much political damage can we do to each other. The reality that we ought to be concerned about is what are we doing in an honest fashion to attack the education problems facing this country, to attack the health care needs facing this country, to attack the science research problems facing this country, to defend the country's national interest through both the defense budget, which is the military side of our foreign policy influence, and what we are doing to advance our national interest diplomatically through the other parts of our foreign policy effort. The sooner we come to honest agreements about that, the sooner we can all quit this sterile debate and get on with the business of being legislators rather than politicians. That is what I would respectfully hope that we do. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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 grew up in Wisconsin as a Chicago Cub fan. That does not have much to do with baseball these days, I know, but I have to say that when the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee, I had the privilege of seeing Hank Aaron play in Milwaukee County Stadium many, many times. I think what we are doing here today is doing two things: first of all, yes, we are paying tribute to him for what he achieved in baseball. But even more than that, I think we are here simply to pay tribute to him for the way he played the game. He did not demonstrate just power, he demonstrated integrity, he demonstrated determination, he demonstrated at all times the qualities that we most admire in all Americans. And I think because he has been a role model not just professionally but personally, he has been a grace to the game and a grace to the country to whom his career has done great honor.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, what a phony debate that I have heard here today. We hear our friends on the majority side of the aisle saying that somehow because the President wants us to meet some of our additional obligations overseas and because our President wants to have a well-rounded defense of our national interest overseas, that somehow he is spending more than our friends on the majority side want, and, therefore, is guilty of all kinds of fiscal sins. I would point out it was not the President who added $16 billion to Pentagon spending for items that the Pentagon did not even ask for and then declared $6 billion of them emergencies so that they could pretend that that money was not being spent under the budget rules. It was not the White House that did that. It was our friends in the majority party. Overall, they spent almost $16 billion more than the President asked for in the supplemental in the regular Pentagon appropriation bill. It was not the President who added $1.3 billion for a whole new ship the Navy did not want. It was our friends on the majority side because it was going to be built in the district of the Majority Leader in the other body, in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The President did not ask to spend that money, that pork. The argument that we are hearing from the majority side comes from a party that has demonstrated time and time again its refusal to support our national interest in a well-rounded fashion around the world. We hear this same argument from people who do not want us to pay our bills at the United Nations, even though we risk losing our vote because of that. We hear it from the same people who are refusing to provide the funding to meet the promises that we had already made in the Middle East with respect to the Wye agreement. I saw one Republican leader stand in the White House and tell the President standing 6 feet away from him that the President had absolutely no right to engage in military action against Serbia because it was a sovereign country. Then after the President reached a successful conclusion of that conflict, I saw that same Republican leader go to the press and denounce the President because he had agreed to a solution that allowed Mr. Milosevic to stay in power. What hypocrisy. How do my colleagues expect we remove Mr. Milosevic, through emaculate conception? It takes military action. This is the same party that last week, in what I believe to be the most irresponsible action by this Congress in 25 years, it is the same party that ripped up the test ban treaty. Now, to understand why that treaty is important, we have to understand why it is linked to the nonproliferation treaty. The United States, under Republican and Democratic Presidents alike, has tried to convince the nonnuclear powers of this world not to achieve nuclear weapons status because it destabilizes the world. So we have tried to set a good example for them. We have said to them, Okay, if you do not develop your nuclear weapons, we will not test ours. Yet, last week, we saw the United States Senate majority party blow away any chance we have to exercise moral leadership on the issue of nuclear test ban treaties. They say, oh, we do not know for sure that we will be 100 percent effective in detecting other people's tests. Well, we were going to be a whole lot more effective than we are right now, because that treaty would have allowed us to place sensors all around the world to detect all but the smallest nuclear explosions. But, no, they had to try to administer another political defeat to the President by defeating the nuclear test ban treaty. So this is a party which has walked away from its responsibilities time and time again in the international arena, and now they try to pretend that they are doing it all in the name of fiscal responsibility and because they want to save Social Security. Are they kidding? Give me a break. The Republican Party is now the great savior of Social Security? The same party that tried to kill that program in the crib before it was ever created? The same party that has tried to turn Social Security over to the insurance industry for 30 years? They want to privatize it to death. The same party that wanted to take billions of dollars out of Medicare in order to pay for a big capital gains tax cut for their buddies? This is the party that we are now supposed to rely upon to save Social Security? All I can say, if that is a record that demonstrates their support of Social Security, God save Social Security. So what are they doing? What all of this is is a giant scam. Our friends in the majority party for the last year have tried to push a tax package through this House which would give 70 percent of the benefits to people who make over 100,000 bucks a year, and they took it home and they tried to sell it over the August break. And what did they find? They found that their constituents did not buy it. And what they found is that they had dropped 12 points to 16 points in the public opinion polls with seniors. So now what we have going on on this floor is operation crawl-back. And what it is, it is an effort to crawl back to another political position in order to try to win a few points back from senior citizens. It ain't gonna work, fellas. It ain't gonna work. What is really going on here, the party that claims it is for fiscal responsibility has produced a budget this year which has more than $40 billion in gimmicks in order to pretend that they are staying within the budget ceilings and in order to pretend that they are not spending a dime in Social Security when, in fact, their own actions have already spent more than $23 billion of the Social Security surplus for other purposes this year. Now, I just have to say, when they have over $40 billion in budget gimmicks, when they have already spent over $23 billion in Social Security, when they have engaged in a gimmick called advanced appropriations, which means they will move the money from this year into next year to hide the fact that they are actually spending it and committing it this year, when those advanced appropriations go from $4 billion to $27 billion, and then they come here and object because the President wants us to pay our U.N. bills, because the President wants us to meet our obligations to the Wye Accords to promote peace in the Middle East, pardon me if I do not take that with a straight face. Pardon me if I think there is just a little bit missing here. When we put all the baloney aside on Social Security, what are the facts? The facts are that every year from 1983 until 1997 this Congress spent every dime that we generated in Social Security surpluses for other purposes and put IOUs in the treasury in order to recognize that fact. In 1997, we spent 100 percent of the Social Security surplus, as the Congress had for years, on other items. But starting last year, starting 2 years ago, I should say, that has been turned around. Two years ago, for the first time, we spent less than one-third of the Social Security surplus on other purposes, and we paid down debt by $60 billion. This last year that just came to a close, we paid down debt by over $100 billion. When all of the baloney is over, whether the Republican Party wins the argument or whether the Democratic Party wins the argument, in the end this coming year we will pay down debt by another $100 billion. Only the people running this House could turn that kind of a major policy victory into a crisis. It seems to me if we want to be honest with the people of the United States, we will tell them that this action in paying down debt over the last 2\1/2\ years has done more to strengthen Social Security than anything that we did for Social Security since the Greenspan Commission saved it with congressional votes. That is the honest truth. But, no, instead, we are going to see this partisan slugfest on Social Security. Well, I have to tell my colleagues that it is not going to fool anybody. It certainly is not going to fool people in the House. They may fool themselves, that would be nothing new, but I would urge my colleagues, in the end, to remember we have an obligation to meet our domestic responsibilities and our international responsibilities in a balanced manner. It would be nice, for once, if we could see that coming out of the Republican leadership in this House. I do not see it today, but I am going to go home tonight and pray again, and maybe some day we will.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, despite the last two comments, the facts are they have already spent $23 billion of the Social Security surplus in bills that they have already passed in the House this year. That is the fact even if they do not want to admit it.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, my wife is a medical social worker. She has worked at D.C. General, she has worked at Georgetown Hospital. She has seen crack babies. Nobody has to lecture me or her or anybody else on that side of the aisle on the idiocy and stupidity of drugs. I hate them. I hate all drugs. But we have a difference of opinion here. We have a difference of opinion about whether we will really save lives by guaranteeing clean needle exchanges for people who are crazy enough or hooked enough to continue the drug habit. We have a difference of opinion on whether we will save lives or not. I also do not happen to agree with the referendum that passed D.C. about the medical uses of marijuana, but I do believe that the District government ought to have the power to work out a rational compromise that does close the door to pain without opening the door to drug abuse. But that is not what is at issue here today, because I recognize that the majority would rather have ``Beat Up on Bill Clinton Day'' than to sit down and negotiate in a rational way to work out agreements on these two issues. So recognizing the hardheaded reality on that side of the aisle, I would also say hardhearted, but it would be against the House rules if I said that, so I will simply say, put those issues aside. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran) has just indicated we may disagree with the gentleman on those issues, but we think the string has been run out on that. So what we do stand here today asking that side to do is this: Recognize the fundamental right of taxpayers in any locality in this country to use their own dollars any blessed way they want in order to defend their own interests in a democratic society, when it comes to the question of whether or not they are going to be able to exercise the most precious right that any individual citizen has in a democracy, the simple right to vote and have that vote count. That is all we are asking at this point: put aside the differences on the drug issues and simply say, okay, you win. And now let us get to the question of democracy. All we have to do, as the gentleman from Virginia said, is to add one word, the word ``Federal,'' so it makes clear that the D.C. government cannot spend Federal money to pursue the right of representation in a democratic system, but that they can spend their own money. What on God's green Earth is wrong with that?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, my response to the gentleman from Georgia who just spoke is simply this. Of course the Congress has the constitutional authority to use its power to shove the District around, but the Constitution does not require that mature people in every instance use the full power that they have when another course is more fair and more rational and more just. Just because we have the muscle does not mean it is always right to exercise it. Once in a while it pays to have a little sense of balance. That is what we are asking you to show for a change today.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, as previous speakers have said, there are many things about this bill that are good. It does a lot of things for a lot of people. But I have one simple question: Is there anybody around here, either on the floor or in any other congressional office on the House side of the Capitol who really knows what is going on around here in terms of the overall spending that will result by the end of the year? Yesterday we passed our biggest bill. That bill accounts for about half of all discretionary spending in the budget. That bill was $9 billion over the President's request. The defense bill. Now we have a bill that is either the second or the third largest appropriations bill, and I think we ought to take a look at its increases. Veterans medical care is $1.7 billion above the President. I think that is fine. I would like to see that more. EPA is $400 million above the President. NASA is $75 million above. Now, each of those programs in and of themselves are worthy programs, and I would like in an ideal world to be spending more on all of them. But my question is, with what we did on defense yesterday, with what we are doing on this bill, where are we going to end up? What is the plan? Indeed, is there a plan to deal with our other critical needs? We have, I think, with the passage of this bill and a number of other bills, we are seeing Congress engage in a gigantic and repetitive shell game. We see double sets of books, we see innovative accounting, we order our own fiscal scorekeeper to simply ignore the fact that one of the bills that we passed will spend $10 billion more than his official numbers would otherwise indicate. What will the DOD bill do to our education priorities in the country, to our health priorities, to our job training priorities, to our efforts to reduce class sizes, to our efforts to produce school modernization? The answer is, nobody knows, because everybody is playing poker without knowing what their hold card is. You can lose an awful lot of money that way. So I would simply suggest, do whatever you want to do on this bill, there are good reasons to vote for it in and of itself, but the fact is that this House does not know what it is doing, it does not know what the end game is going to be, and certainly Members need to be aware of the fact that the appropriations bills on their present track contain over $42 billion in spending gimmicks, and, in fact, that means that, despite all of the declarations to the contrary, these budget bills are eating up virtually all of the non-Social Security surplus and are certainly at this point headed down the road to spend close to $20 billion of the Social Security surplus. I say that simply in the interest of honest accounting, and I say that to simply urge Members once again to ask, where is this all going to wind up? The only way to work out a decent end is for this institution to sit down with the White House and have both parties represented and work out our differences so that we know what each of these bills is doing to other key national priorities that we also have an obligation to deal with.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for the time. Mr. Speaker, a minute ago, I talked about the gimmicks that were in this bill that hide its true spending levels. I would like to continue on that theme and put it in context by walking the House through what the gimmicks are in all of the appropriations bills that we are expected to try to pass. First of all, with respect to this bill itself, one of the gimmicks in this bill, I guess I would call it the Government Deadbeat Amendment for the year. It simply says that the government is going to delay payment to defense contractors on the bills that we owe from 12 days to 17 days, thereby saving $1.2 billion by squeezing that money into the next fiscal year. I would like to point out when we do that, we are not only affecting the cash flow of the United States Government, we are affecting the cash flow of thousands of U.S. businesses, and we are affecting their balance sheets for the quarter in question and for the entire fiscal year. And I think that what that really does is to increase the cost of doing business with Uncle Sam. So what is the response of these contractors likely to be? The response is likely to be that they will factor in that problem the next time they write a contract with Uncle Sam. The net effect is it will raise the cost of those contracts down the line and, in the end, the taxpayers will pay for this foolishness. This is just one example of one of the problems in the bill. And as I say, I make no criticisms to the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) or the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) when I cite this, because they had no choice but to include gimmicks like this because everybody in this House is under orders from the leadership to hide the true levels of spending. And it is not just happening on this bill. It is happening on all of them. On agriculture we had just in directed scoring alone, not counting the emergency designation, just in directed scoring alone, which means that they pretend that they are going to spend less than they are actually going to spend, they hide $163 million that way. In the Commerce-Justice bill, they hide $5.4 billion through a series of budgetary gimmicks. In this bill, as I said earlier, they hide $21.5 billion in spending that way. In the Energy and Water bill that passed, they hide $103 million. In the Foreign Operations bill, they hide $159 million. Interior, the House-passed bill, hides $159 million, as well. Then in the Labor Health bill, which was reported by the committee, we will have $12.1 billion in assorted gimmicks, some of which their own leading presidential contender has denounced as being unfair because they balanced the budget on the backs of the poor. In Transportation we have $1.4 billion worth of these gimmicks that hide the true nature of congressional spending. In Treasury-Post Office they hide $151 million. In the VA-HUD bill, which is going to come to the floor yet this week, they hide $1.5 billion through what I would call these hidden card tricks in a magic show. The problem is that it is not just a few suckers paying a quarter who are fooled, the entire American public is deceived in the process. That means that government-wide, in all of the appropriations bills that we are supposed to consider this year, we have over $43 billion in gimmicks. When we subtract $14 billion from that, which represents the amount of the non-Social Security surplus that we have for the coming year on that we are expected to have, that means we have bills $29 billion over the spending caps in real terms when we do not count the gimmicks. Now, I want to make clear some of this has happened before. This is not unprecedented. But what is unprecedented is the huge amount of game playing that is going on. I would just suggest, in the end, both parties would be better off if we level with the American people and if we simply tell them what the true effects are. I know the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) tried to avoid this. He tried to bring a series of bills out of committee which were bipartisan in nature and which were a whole lot more honest than the bills that we are running to the floor today, but he was cut off at the pass by people in his caucus who thought they knew better. The result is that the level of consumer fraud in this House has reached record levels, and I think that is unfortunate for the country and the institution.