Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. Mr. Speaker, I simply take this time to notify the House I will be offering a straight motion to recommit. If my colleagues believe that we should not be unnecessarily abusing the environment, if they believe that we should not be unnecessarily hurting our ability to help people who desperately need health care, if they believe that we should not abuse the emergency designation in the budget process, then I would invite them to vote yes for the motion to recommit. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, could I simply ask the gentleman, if there is a breakthrough which would enable the bill to pass, God help us given some of the provisions that are now in it, but if it does nonetheless pass, so be it, but could I also ask the gentleman to entertain the possibility of also, as a backup, preparing a stripped-down bill so that if this does not go anywhere that we, in fact, have something for Members to vote on tomorrow if they are going to be here, something which will not get jammed up in a filibuster in the Senate?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, let me simply ask the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) two questions. First of all, would he be kind enough to tell us, if that is the case, what is the fate of the two markups now going on? We are both supposed to be attending both of those.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would simply observe that the last vote that we just had was to instruct the conferees to reject any items that were not in either the House or the Senate bill. I find that interesting, but the fact is that the hang up in the conference is over items that were in the Senate bill or in the House bill, and I know of no progress that has been made through the remainder of this day so far on this bill. We are presently marking up appropriations for the coming fiscal year right now. We are supposed to be, as soon as we finish the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies, we are supposed to be going into a Treasury Post Office markup, but I do not know of any progress that has been made in resolving the outstanding issues before us. I guess, I think, there is at least a 50/50 chance Members will be kept here tomorrow only to discover that there will be nothing to vote on. So I guess what I would ask the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey), the distinguished majority leader, is if we are going to be held around here, why do we not simply bring a clean bill to the floor that takes the items that we know are agreed upon by everybody and pass legislation which is a truly clean bill, rather than waiting around here for a miracle to happen on a bill that has so many barnacles that it is not likely to sail any time soon?

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Kilpatrick). (Ms. KILPATRICK asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver).

Mr. OBEY. No, I asked how much time did the gentleman yield back?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, this country is engaged in a war which is the consequence of the inability of the West to act going as far back as 1982. Mr. Milosevic has been consistently and perniciously grinding people into the dust in Bosnia, in Croatia, in Kosovo for over a decade. And because action was not taken to stop him more than a decade ago, the cost of stopping him now is going to be much higher than it otherwise would have been. We can all argue about how we got here, but the fact is we are here, and we owe the troops in the field and we owe the President an obligation to deal with this issue on the merits--right down the middle. I do not think this House has done a very good job of doing that. We have seen an incredible array of political comments the last few weeks. Last week, for instance, we have seen one Member of this body indicate that this needed to be clearly understood as Clinton's war rather than the national problem that it really is. We saw a good many efforts being made to simultaneously oppose what the President is doing and what NATO is doing and at the same time double the spending for conducting that war. We saw 80 percent of the Members of the majority party vote last week against conducting the very operation which today they are suggesting we should spend twice as much money on as the President is asking. I think that that is spectacularly inconsistent, and I think it is confusing and destructive of our ability to find common ground on this issue. The President asked for $6 billion, a little over $6 billion, to finance a war which is literally an 800-plane, 24-hour-a-day constant bombarding of all of Yugoslavia, not just Kosovo. He has asked for funds fully sufficient to conduct at least that level of activity between now and the end of the fiscal year. In addition to that, he has asked for funds fully sufficient to pay for an Apache operation over there twice as large as the one which is now operating. And it seems to me that we ought to support him in that effort. The majority party has responded, after falling off one side of the horse last week by refusing to support this operation, they are now responding by falling off the other side of the horse and saying, in essence, that we ought to increase the size of this bill by 125 percent. They increased $460 million for additional munitions. The amendment now before us says, all right, in the interest of compromise, we will buy that. They increased procurement by $400 million. We say, okay, in the interest of compromise, we will buy that too. They provided a billion dollars to avoid reprogramming for operation and maintenance items because they want to make sure we have enough money to fully fund all of the Pentagon's needs, not just in Kosovo but elsewhere. We say, okay, we agree with that. We will give them that billion dollars. What we do not want to give them is the $3 billion that has nothing whatsoever to do with Kosovo but has everything to do with another game that is going on. We have 2 simultaneous problems. We have the Kosovo problem. We also have a budget problem. And under the budget which the majority passed two weeks ago, caps were established on what we can spend for every category of Government, including defense. What they are now trying to do with this bill is to take $3 billion of items that are not related to Kosovo, stick them in this bill, which will, therefore, enable them to spend $3 billion more on what largely are pork items. And we do not agree with doing that. So we removed that $3 billion. That still leaves us $5 billion above the President's request, a huge amount of funding. And we make the pay raise, which the majority party claims it is providing real, by making it deliverable immediately rather than deliverable upon passage of another piece of legislation. That is what we do. We also, responding to some of the advice of Members, such as the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Callahan) who suggested that we need more money by way of food aid. We have also provided that. What we do not want to do is misuse the precious privilege we have to declare certain items emergencies when we think they are emergencies. And it just seems to me, therefore, that if they want to avoid polarizing this issue, they would take the amendment that we are offering today and support it in the interest of moving both sides to the center. Now, some persons will say, well, we have to add all of these items to this bill despite the fact that they are not emergency items because we have a readiness problem, and they claim that the President is responsible for that. The fact is that for the last 4\1/2\ years the majority party has been in control, they have added $27 billion to the President's military budgets and all but $3\1/2\ billion of that has gone to non-readiness items. I did not make those choices. They did. They had the votes to push them through and they did. I would simply ask, if we do have a readiness problem today, I would say let us take care of it. The defense bill is going to be coming out here in a few weeks' time. Deal with it on that bill. What I would say, also, is that if they think that we have a readiness problem, why did they put 80 percent of the money they added to the defense budget in non-readiness items? That seems to me again spectacularly inconsistent. We are also told, ``Oh, we have to put more money in because the Pentagon says that they are stretched too thin.'' I want to read from a document prepared by the Pentagon. It makes five points. It says: ``In the event of a major theater war, assets would be required to swing between theaters to support major theater war operations and the ongoing operation in Kosovo, just as envisioned by the Quadrennial Defense Review.'' The second thing it says is: ``The total number of Air Force aircraft deployed or planned for Kosovo represent only about 25 percent of the total number of the services' primary aircraft. Clearly, the Air Force possesses sufficient forces to meet an additional regional war with some aircraft still in reserve.'' It also makes the point that the Navy has already taken the steps needed to ameliorate the situation in the Western Pacific by making the U.S.S. Constellation ready to sail within 96 hours if it is needed to support operations in Korea. It also makes a number of other points which refute the idea that there is such a crisis in military spending that we must wholesale abuse the emergency designation in this legislation. I want every dollar that is needed for any contingency in Kosovo to be provided, but I do not want this Congress to misuse the emergency designation in order to simply facilitate moving $3 billion from the regular appropriation bill into this bill by pretending it is an emergency, thereby making room for the same kind of pork items that have been added in the past that, in my view, should not have been added. So that is, essentially, the issue that we face. And I would also say one other thing. We have heard people say there must be a more fair division of burdens between us and our NATO allies. I could not agree more. And so I would ask, if people believe that, why are they supporting the original bill which forward funds--in other words pays one year early--the $240 million military construction obligation that we will have for our share of NATO costs next year? There is no other country in the world that is providing that money a year ahead of time. If we provide that money ahead of time, it takes away from our leverage to ask that other NATO allies meet their fair share of the cost in dealing with this war. So I do not want to hear any rhetoric about how we must oppose the Obey amendment in order to support our troops in the field. This amendment fully supports every possible requirement of troops in the field. What it does not do is engage in the fiction that we ought to use this war in order to pretend that billions of additional dollars are emergencies when in fact they are not. There is no emergency that requires us to build 37 of those military construction projects in Europe, which the Pentagon did not even want on its list for the next 5 years. This reminds me of the debate just a couple years ago where the Congress insisted on providing a billion- dollar aircraft to the Pentagon that it did not want. And one last comment again, because I heard it three times, on JDAMs. Yes, we need more JDAMs. This is a new weapon. The administration asked that their request be fully funded last year. It was not Bill Clinton that cut the funds for that program. It was not the gentleman from Wisconsin. It was the committee, under the control of the majority party, which cut that request by 18 percent. So I remind my colleagues, if they want to know why some of these so- called readiness problems afflict the military, I would advise them to simply look in the mirror; and keep in mind that today we are supposed to be funding emergencies on an emergency basis, we are not supposed to be using it to play ``let us pretend'' games on next year's budget. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I also reserve a point of order on the amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment made in order under the rule.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Reyes).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I simply want to say on this side we agree with the amendment and accept it.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my point of order, and I rise in opposition to the amendment. Mr. Chairman, as Franklin Roosevelt said once, I hate war. And I am sure everybody in this room does. But I have to tell my colleagues that I think this amendment, while it may be well-intentioned, I think would have very pernicious results. Back in 1982 when my son was a student in Germany, I went to the University of Friedberg and I gave a speech to the student body right after Germany had recognized Croatia. What I said was essentially this: I said, Look, your country has just recognized Croatia, against the wishes of the United States Government. I said, the United States in 1948 recognized Israel; and when we did that, we incurred a permanent obligation to defend their security. And what I said to them was that, You may not like it, but the fact is that when you recognize Croatia the way you did, you triggered certain events; and Mr. Milosevic is not going to stand by and watch Yugoslavia slowly fall apart. He will be taking serious military action. And in fact, in the end, we will have to be involved militarily and so will you. Now, when I said that to that German audience, they booed. They did not like what I said. But the fact is that I believe I was correct, and I think events have borne that out. I am convinced that if we had bombed Milosevic immediately after he began his first ethnic cleansing campaigns, that within a week he would have been out of power because there was a strong political opposition to Mr. Milosevic at that time. But the West temporized for 10 years; and so literally we have had the number of people die because of Mr. Milosevic's actions which are equivalent to more than half of the population of my congressional district. Now, they were not Americans, so maybe we are not all that concerned, but I think we should be. I think we need to have meant it when we said about Europe after Hitler in World War II ``Never Again!'' And I think when the President walked into this problem and we saw what was happening in Yugoslavia, that we had an obligation to try to stop it. Now, if this Congress had an objection to that action, then it should have stated so when we were at the beginning of the war. The Senate did take action in supporting what the administration was doing. This House did not act. Now that we are in this situation, I think we have an obligation not to make it worse. I think we make it worse for the refugees. I think we make it worse for our troops whose lives are now on the line, including those Apache helicopter pilots. I think we owe it to them to support policies that can get us out of this war as quickly as possible. I do not know whether we should use ground forces or not militarily. That is a military judgment which ought to be made by our military commanders with the agreement of the Commander in Chief. That is the way the Constitution is set up. The Congress has the power to say whether we should or should not be in a war. But if we are in it, we do not have the power to micromanage it, in my view. And we certainly do not have the talent to or the information to. And so it seems to me that the best way that we can try to assure that the air war succeeds, and I have grave doubts about that, I come much closer to John McCain on that than I do anybody else in this Congress, but the best chance we have to make that air war to succeed is to let Mr. Milosevic think that he may be facing a ground attack if it does not. If we want the Russians to play with this issue for real rather than just around the edges for domestic consumption, we also need to let them know that if their efforts at negotiation do not succeed, they may very well see a ground situation. That is, in my view, the best way to try to assure that the air war will achieve its desired ends. I respect the opinion of every single person in this institution, but I would urge them not to take this action and support this amendment because I think it will be immensely counterproductive and could in fact lead to the loss of more lives.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, may I ask the Chair how much time the gentleman yielded back?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 6 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, objection has been heard from the other side of the aisle because I have stated, as have others, that this war is being politicized. Let me tell my colleagues why I say that. A spokesman for your leadership last week, in explaining to the press how they justified voting to double spending for a war which last week they opposed conducting at all, said: ``it is easier for us to support the Pentagon than it is to support this President.'' The distinguished majority whip took the floor just a few minutes ago and said ``This President is bombing his way around the globe.'' That is the same gentleman who was reported in a Washington Post article last week to have called in a series of lobbyists to ask them to lobby for this bill. One member is quoted in the article, `` `We've added a lot in defense money to this,' said one lawmaker who asked not to be identified. `That helps those lobbyists.' '' That is not my quote. That is a member of the other side. Another member of the leadership is quoted as saying, ``We want to make clear that this is Clinton's war.'' The majority is suggesting that we ought to, instead of supporting the request that the President has made of almost $7 billion, instead they are pouring billions of dollars, totally unrelated to the war, into this budget bill which is supposed to be an emergency appropriation for Kosovo. And what effect does that have? That gives the public the impression that the war costs a whole lot more than it is actually costing. Then they wonder why I raise objections about the politicization which has gone on. Then we have heard that Clinton has almost single-handedly weakened the military. I would point out that the other side of the aisle has controlled this House for the last 4\1/2\ years. They have spent more than $1 trillion on military spending during that time. They have added $27 billion to the President's request. Yet all but $3.5 billion of that has gone for items other than readiness. If they are so concerned about readiness, why did they not put the money there, instead of spreading it and larding it for pork items all throughout the budget? Pork items which have been amply reported in the press. I heard one speaker say that it was terrible that we did not have enough JDAM missiles. I would point out, it was the majority party that pushed a bill through this House last year which cut the appropriation for JDAMs from $53 million to $46 million and cut the number of available missiles by 17 percent. If they really believed we needed additional money for readiness, why did they not put the money there in the 4\1/2\ years that they have led this institution? And then, lastly, we hear a speaker say that we have got to have better burdensharing between other NATO countries and the United States. Yet their version of this bill gratuitously pays, 1 year ahead of time, our full military construction dues to NATO. That makes us the only country in the world that provides them money ahead of time. How are we going to get better burdensharing when we are acting like Uncle Sucker doing that? I would urge Members to vote for my amendment when the time comes. That is the responsible action to take.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to this amendment. The problem we face here is that we are operating under a budget process which is, in my view, a public lie. I think the entire budget process is a fraud, and because it is, we see amendments like this offered which, in substance, would make no sense whatsoever. We are already required by the budget to cut virtually everything that the government provides on the domestic side of the ledger by 13 percent next year. This budget or this amendment would require us to cut that even more deeply. Over the next 5 years the budget requires us to cut virtually everything that we do on the domestic side of the ledger by 18 percent in real terms. I do not know of many Members of this House on either side of the aisle who would actually vote for that when the time comes. We are required to cut health by 18 percent over that period, we are required to cut administration of justice by 18 percent in real terms over that period, we are required to cut agriculture by 25 percent over that period, in real terms. This amendment would add to those cuts. It would require us to make further reductions in health funding, such as the National Institutes of Health, which this Congress pretended just 3 weeks ago it wanted to double spending on. It would require us to make further cuts in the FBI. It would require us to make cuts of 2 percent in veterans' health care, and deeper cuts in other veterans' programs. I do not believe that that is what the public supports. This is portrayed as a Social Security amendment. It does not really have anything to do with that issue. I do not know of many Social Security recipients who think that we ought to be cutting veterans benefits, who think we ought to be cutting the Weather Service. Ask the senior citizens who just had their homes wiped out in Oklahoma whether they would like to see the Weather Service cut back further so they get even less warning from tornadoes than they got last week. It just seems to me that this is an amendment which is extreme in nature. It suggests that there is only one priority in the entire country; and, in fact, I do not know of many responsible citizens over 65 or under 65 that happen to share that view. What they want us to do is to take a balanced view, recognize something that is an emergency and recognize what it is not. That is what we should be doing instead of dealing with this amendment today.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the remainder of my time. Mr. Chairman, we have been facing three emergencies. One is with the war in Kosovo, which this bill is supposed to be dealing with; and then we have two others, two other weather-related emergencies; one in Central America which has created such a disastrous situation because people are not able to make a living after Hurricane Mitch in Central America. We are going to see a flood of immigrants coming into this country unless we do something about it. Second is the emergency in rural America, which is caused in part by natural disasters and in part by the collapse of farm prices for a number of commodities. When this all first began, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, tried to do the right thing. He produced a proposal to deal with the first emergency in Central America and in rural America, and he had a bipartisan approach to it which we were fully willing to support. Then his party leadership intervened and said, ``no, we do not want to do it that way.'' So they reversed course, and they attached a number of pay-for provisions to the supplemental, which were terribly risky for the national security interests of the United States. Among other things, they would have paid for the supplemental by pulling $175 million off the table that we needed on the table in order to negotiate with the Russians an agreement to get out of their hands weapons grade plutonium. There is no higher priority of our government than doing that. And yet that agreement was put in danger by the reckless bill which passed the House in order to pay for the agriculture problems. That bill, because of those outrageous offsets, has been languishing in the Senate going nowhere. So when this bill came to the floor, we produced an amendment on this side which we will vote upon sometime today, which tries to recognize that we ought to deal with the emergency for the folks on the home front the same way we deal with the emergency for Kosovo. We believe it deserves equal treatment under our actions here. Now, what is going on here today is very simple. Because our amendment includes a number of provisions to deal with the emergency in rural America, our friends on the other side of the aisle are feeling the political heat. So they are looking for a way, in my view, to obscure the lack of progress that has gone on dealing with the problems on the farm front so far. This is, in effect, what many people would call a cover-your-tail amendment, to be blunt about it. It is paid for by hijacking one of the items that we used to pay for our amendment. The worst thing about it is not what it does, because I do not really oppose the idea of providing credit for farmers. Obviously, we have been trying to get that done for months. So has the administration. But the problem is that that is the only thing this amendment does on the farm front. It does nothing to provide the $42 million that is necessary in order to help eliminate the backlog in loan deficiency payments, for instance, out in rural America. It provides nothing for section 32 aid to hog farmers, who desperately need it. It is consistent with past Republican actions on farm issues, however. Because we will remember in 1993 when we had the Mississippi and Missouri River floods which devastated large sections of this country, the majority held up passage of emergency help on that score for months, debating about what the offsets should be. In 1996 when Grand Forks in the upper Midwest again was flooded and facing an emergency, again the majority party held up for months passage of getting effective relief to those folks, again because we got into the same accountant's debate. Now today again we are told that this is an important issue, but it is not important enough to treat it as an emergency, although, in this very bill, they are treating as emergencies the construction of a number of facilities in Europe which the Pentagon did not even want to build for the next 5 years. If anybody believes that this amendment, well-intentioned as it may be, is sufficient to bring into parallel treatment military bases in Europe versus the needs of our farmers at home, they are not reading this amendment or this bill very carefully. I am going to oppose this amendment, not because I am opposed to the intent, but because of the double standard which is being applied which does not recognize the emergency on the farm to the same degree that we recognize other problems; and secondly, because I think it is a mistake not to include the other assistance that my amendment provides for livestock, for watershed flood improvement, for the rural housing problems. So that is why I think we ought to recognize this amendment for what it is and treat it accordingly.