Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I just heard the distinguished majority whip indicate that we cannot abandon our troops in the field. I do not know of a single person in the House who has any intention of doing that. I do think that the interpretation of the vote that occurred last week might, in some people's minds, be interpreted that way, but I certainly do not know of anyone who intentionally intends to do that on either side of the aisle. I do want to take just a moment to discuss this myth that somehow it is the Clinton administration which has created a military readiness problem. I would point out that for 4\1/2\ years the majority party has controlled this Congress. During that time it has added $27 billion to the President's military requests. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that less than $4 billion of that $27 billion went into readiness items such as operation and maintenance. The rest of the items went into what are largely considered military pork projects: the consolation prize destroyer that was provided in the district of the majority leader in the other body after his contractor was not selected by the Defense Department, the decision of the Congress to fund 10 additional C-130s that the Pentagon did not ask for rather than putting that funding into readiness. Senator McCain himself has pointed out that there were more than $4\1/2\ billion worth of pork items in the military budget last year. They were in charge. If they thought there was a readiness problem, why did they not put the money there rather than where they put it? I saw a comment in the paper which said that the President was responsible for the fact that there were not enough JDAMs. The fact is they cut those missiles by 17 percent last year in the defense budget they brought to the floor. So let us keep the record straight.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Hall) for the time. Mr. Speaker, I am going to vote against this rule. I had not intended to. Yes, when we were in discussions with the Committee on Rules and the committee leadership, I had the feeling that with the promises that we had been given that we were going to see a new day in this House with more bipartisan cooperation in the way legislation is brought to the floor and that those promises were, in fact, going to be kept. Then, after a series of conversations, apparently people behind the scenes decided that that rule was going to be shaped quite differently. Among the things that were done is that the committee put time limits-- under what is supposedly an open rule, the committee still put time limits of 40 minutes--on the major amendment that we are going to be debating on this bill. That amendment is very complicated; yet each side will only have 20 minutes to debate it. The amendment is complicated enough it will take 10 minutes to explain it, which will leave only 10 minutes to discuss the merits. That is not the way to debate questions of war or, for that matter, some of the other serious issues that are in this bill. Secondly, another amendment is being offered by the majority which is paid for by hijacking items that were in our amendment to pay for the items that we have listed in our amendment. In my view, that is an effort to weaken political support for our amendment. I would simply point out that since the majority has two-thirds of the staffing available or more in this place, to put together their legislation, I do not think they have an operational need to, in effect, steal or highjack our amendments, but that is largely what has been done. So it just seems to me that this rule is not what it was going to be yesterday and for that reason I am going to oppose it. I also want to say something else. I think that what happened on this rule is symptomatic of what is happening on this entire bill. I did not vote for the Rambouillet endorsement when it was on the floor. I do not believe in giving any administration a blank check, but we are now in a war and we have rampant misery which has been brought to the world, to the refugees and to a lot of others. We did not start that war; Mr. Milosevic did. Now the question is: What will NATO and what will the United States do about it? I believe we ought to do everything necessary to win. I do not believe the options for ground troops ought to be off the table and in that I very strongly agree with Senator McCain. But to me, that issue right now is beside the point. The issue is whether this House can come together and debate one of the most fundamental issues that will be before any legislative body, in a manner which is both bipartisan and constructive. I do not think this rule gets us off to a good start. In my view, if we cannot play this issue straight we cannot play any issue straight, with American lives on the line and with the future credibility of NATO on the line. What it seems to me is that we are being faced with a shifting understanding of what the rules are supposed to be for debating this legislation at the same time that we see spectacularly shifting positions on the part of the majority. Last week, the House voted against supporting the operation that is now going on in Kosovo and yet this week we are now asked to more than double the request that the administration made to finance that operation. That makes no sense whatsoever. I believe the reason that that has been done is that I believe last week's amendment was clearly intended to simply pin the label on the war of being Clinton's war, unfortunately politicizing the situation. Now, this week I think there is an effort being made to in essence pour all kind of money into this bill so we can free up enough room for $3 billion worth of pork in the next defense bill. I think that is illegitimate. I do not think we ought to be treating a serious issue like this this way and I would urge a vote against the rule because it is not conducive to finding common ground on the most serious issue we face.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I thank the Chairman.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 11 minutes. Mr. Chairman, as I said on debate on the rule, this is one of the most serious votes that we will be casting this year. If we cannot play it straight on this amendment, we cannot play it straight on anything. This amendment should not be politicized. What we should be doing with this amendment is to provide every single dollar that we need to conduct the operations now going on in Kosovo. We should not provide one dime less and neither should we try to use this to play games on the budget. I am baffled by the fact that last week this House declined to support the operation that is now going on in Kosovo and yet this week the same people largely who opposed that motion last week are now suggesting that we should double the amount of spending for the operation which last week they said we should not be conducting at all. That gives confusion and inconsistency a bad name, in my view. I did not vote for the administration's original request on Rambouillet. I did not feel that we knew enough about what the results of that discussion would be in order to cast a vote at that time, and I did not believe in giving any administration a blank check. I know that there are a lot of people in this House who do not like President Clinton, and I think a number of Members have gone overboard in trying to politicize this war because they have such intense dislike for the President. I have seen quote after quote in the newspapers saying, ``This is Clinton's war; we do not want our fingerprints on it.'' I think those kind of comments are irresponsible. This is the West's war. This is NATO's war, and in my view the President is doing the best that anybody can under very difficult circumstances. That does not mean I agree with everything the administration is doing. I agree with Senator McCain. I believe that this war needs to be prosecuted in the most aggressive way possible, and I believe that the best way to assure the success of the air war is to threaten use of a ground war. So I do not necessarily agree with the administration on the fine points, but he is our commander in chief. He is the elected leader of this country. We are also elected leaders of this country, and we ought to be behaving ourselves in a manner consistent with the honor that has been afforded to each and every one of us by our constituents. I do not think we do that when we in one week decide that this House is not going to support that operation and again then in the next week decide but, oh, by the way, we are going to use this war as an excuse to move billions of dollars from next year's appropriation into this year's appropriation, put an emergency label on it which will enable the Congress next year to spend $3 billion more on military pork that has nothing whatsoever to do with Kosovo. In my view, that is what is happening today. So I want to explain the amendment that I will be offering later in debate. The administration has asked about $6 billion to cover the cost of this war, plus they have asked for humanitarian assistance. The amount that they have requested will pay for an 800-plane war, 24 hours a day bombing of virtually every target in Yugoslavia that one could imagine anywhere. That will be sustained on a daily basis through the end of the fiscal year. In addition, the administration has asked for enough money to fund not just the 24 Apaches which are on the ground now but a contingent of 50 Apaches, over $700 million just to finance that. The administration has taken the full estimate of what it will cost to run that war for the remainder of the fiscal year and then, on top of that, just to be safe, they have tossed in an extra $850 million in a contingency fund. That is such a large operation that we will run out of targets before we run out of ammunition. We will, in the words of Winston Churchill, be ``bouncing the rubble'' if this continues that long. Now, the committee has done some other things. The committee has decided that they would raise the spending for that bill by 125 percent. They have asked for $460 million more in munitions. My amendment says, all right, we are not going to argue about that. We will accept it. They have asked for $400 million for procurement; and again we say, okay, we are not going to argue about it. We will accept it. They have asked for a billion dollars more than the President in order to avoid having to reprogram from low-priority items to high- priority items. We say, okay, I doubt that that is fully necessary, but we will accept that, too. What we do not accept are two other items in the bill. The budget rules under which we are supposed to operate say that if we want to designate something as an emergency so that it is exempted from the spending caps in our budget, it must meet two tests. It must, first of all, be an unanticipated expense; and, secondly, it has to be an expense which will be incurred immediately for an immediate purpose. There is $3 billion in the committee bill that does not meet those tests. Example: They have $2 billion in this bill for operation and maintenance, which is nothing but moving forward from next year's budget $2 billion into this emergency supplemental. There is also $1 billion added for 77 military construction projects in Europe. Thirty-seven of those items are not even on the Pentagon's 5-year plan. We do not have physical plans for them. We do not really know what they are, but the money is thrown at them. Why? The reason is very simple. There is an agenda on the part of some Members of this House which says let us throw in as much as we can, call it an emergency Kosovo supplemental, even though it is not at all related to Kosovo, and that will enable us to spend $3 billion that we would not have otherwise been able to spend on the regular bill for pork. That is what is going on, in my view. So my amendment does not accept that $3 billion. The only military construction items that we fund are those directly related to Kosovo, three key items that are fully justified, including one operation at Aviano, and the rest we simply say deal with next year in the regular course of business because they do not relate to Kosovo. In addition, we do two other things. The committee has $1.8 billion in the bill which they suggest should go for a pay raise and a retirement enrichment package for the troops. I support that. The problem with the committee amendment is that it is subject to authorization, and that means that even though the money is in the bill it cannot actually be delivered to the troops until further legislation is passed. So we remove that impediment. We remove the language that makes that subject to authorization so that this is not just a potentially empty promise. We actually deliver the money that we say we want to provide. So, in other words, we make that pay raise real. The second thing we do is to take the supplemental, which the House passed previously, which is languishing in the Senate, which the President asked for it to deal with the largest natural disaster in this hemisphere in this century, Hurricane Mitch, and to deal with the emergency facing many farmers because of weather and because of the collapse of prices, and we include that in this package as well so that we take care of the home front as well as Kosovo. If we do not deal with that, we face the prospect of 100,000 refugees trying to make their way from Central American countries through Texas, through New Mexico, and it would cost us far more than dealing with it in this bill. So what I will simply say is, this amendment is an honest effort to reach a compromise position between the administration's original request and the committee's overblown efforts to throw in everything but the kitchen sink in this bill so that they can make more room for military pork in the regular military bill. I would urge that my colleagues do the responsible thing, adopt the Obey amendment when it is offered. That will send a signal that we are, indeed, going to play this straight. We are not going to abuse the emergency power that we have in the Budget Act but we will make every dime that is necessary to the Kosovo operation available and then some. We are exceeding what the administration thinks is necessary by almost a billion dollars, just in their own request, plus the additional items that we are accepting in this package. I would urge support for the amendment when the time comes.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Chairman, the gentleman is putting up a red herring. I did not say that there was pork in this bill. What I said was they are jamming $3 billion of nonemergency items into this bill to make room for $3 billion worth of pork in the defense bill which will follow this. The gentleman knows that is what I said. He ought to keep it straight. Secondly, with respect to the JDAMS, the gentleman says there is a shortage of JDAM missiles. I would point out that the gentleman is the chairman of the subcommittee that cut that last year by 17 percent. The gentleman cut the President's request for that item by 13 percent in dollar terms and 17 percent in missile numbers. The President's request provides full funding for the restoration of every missile they need for JDAMS.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I would like to have an understanding that unless the sponsor of an amendment which we know is out of order agrees to a 1-minute discussion of it, we will immediately move to make the point of order.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, we have now had a number of amendments brought to the House floor which the authors understand are not in accordance with the House rules and which the committee understands are not in accordance with the House rules. I had been under the impression that we were going to recognize that a lot of Members have other time obligations and we would not be debating issues which we do not have the right under the rules to debate. So what I would simply ask of the gentleman from Florida is this: I wonder if we could have an understanding that if there are any further amendments that are offered that are clearly subject to points of order that we will immediately make those points of order unless the sponsor of the amendment agrees to limit the time they want to discuss them to 1 minute. Otherwise, we are going to inconvenience many Members.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, we gave a lot of reasons why Members should vote against the rule when it was before us. One of the reasons is that not enough time was provided for a number of amendments. If we had had some time in opposing that rule we might have been able to deal with each of the problems equitably, but I do not think it is fair to make adjustment to only one amendment, and therefore, I do object, Mr. Chairman.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds. If the gentleman is going to make the statement that there are Members of this House who do not care about our servicemen or the national security interests of this country, I think he ought to have courage enough to identify which Members he is talking about or else not say something so ridiculous on this House floor. That is the kind of meaningless, nasty rhetoric that discredits this entire institution; and the gentleman ought to take back those remarks.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 15 seconds. As usual, the gentleman has his facts wrong. Jordan is fully offset in the Obey amendment. There is not one dime that adds to the deficit under that. I wish that if the gentleman is going to attack my amendment, he would at least first understand it correctly.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I also reserve a point of order on the amendment offered by the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Istook).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 20 seconds. With all due respect to the previous speaker, what I did was ask the gentleman who spoke earlier to identify which Members of the House, in his words, ``did not care about our troops and did not care about the national security interests of this country.'' That is what I, and, no, I will not yield to the gentleman. He has not shown courtesy to me, and I will not show it to him. Mr. Chairman, I am simply not going to tolerate that kind of ad hominem attack on Members. It is a disservice to this House to attack Members with innuendo as the gentleman just did. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of the time to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Gephardt), our distinguished Minority Leader. (Mr. GEPHARDT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I continue to reserve my point of order, and under my reservation I ask the gentleman a question.

Mr. OBEY. I am continuing to reserve my point of order, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. OBEY. Well, I continue to reserve my point of order; and I would ask if the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) would yield.

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