Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I would ask the gentleman from Oklahoma if he could explain to us what the words in his amendment ``in time of war'' mean? Is that a declaration of war or is it something else?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will continue to yield, that means it would not apply to Kosovo?

Mr. OBEY. But the gentleman is saying there must be a declaration of war for a time of war to exist, or is he saying there are other conditions which might pertain?

Mr. OBEY. Well, Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding under his time.

Mr. OBEY. Not for JDAMs.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, I reserve a point of order on the amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. OBEY. Yes, Mr. Chairman, because we do not have a copy of it, and I have no idea whether it is permissible under the Rules or not. We have no idea what the content is. I would like the amendment read.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I do this to try to avoid having to take a lot of time on a recommittal motion, and let me say this about final passage of this bill: I have frankly gotten whiplash from watching the majority party reverse its position on military action in Yugoslavia during the past week. First we had a vote to withdraw troops, and they voted 127 to 92 in favor. Then on the Gejdenson amendment, the one originally offered in the Senate by Senators McCain and Warner to support current policy in Yugoslavia, namely the air war, they voted 31 to 187 against. Of the 97 Republicans who voted against the withdrawal, 62 voted against the air war. They then voted for a resolution restricting the use of ground troops 203 to 16, but that was last week. Now, we have had the Istook amendment on this bill, which tried to make real last week's restriction on ground troops, and the same leadership which lobbied their Members to restrict the use of ground troops last week lobbied them against a restriction on ground troops this week. This time they voted against the restriction 116 to 97. A total of 101 reversed their vote from a week earlier. Now, finally, undoubtedly they will vote overwhelmingly for final passage of an appropriation that more than doubles the amount of money requested by the President for the war which they voted against last week. I respect every individual decision made in this House. I simply want to express the hope that the conference will produce a more consistent product, a more disciplined product, and a product that more effectively and accurately does reflect the true costs of the operation that we are now engaged in. I would ask each and every Member of this House on final passage to disregard the desires of either party leadership and simply vote their consciences. I will intend to vote no. I vote no not because I do not believe we ought to be involved in Yugoslavia. I do, and I passionately support the efforts there and the efforts of our troops. I simply believe that this bill is one that has engaged in excess. I do not want to prolong the debate by offering a motion to recommit, which could take more time, but I wanted to say that now so that we can put in some perspective what the final vote will represent in the context of what has happened in this House the last 2 weeks. Amendment No. 8 Offered by Mr. Smith of Michigan.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, over the last month this Congress could not have been more irresponsible in the way it has dealt with the issue in Kosovo if it had taken lessons. I would like to walk through with you the quaint way in which this institution has stumble- bummed its way through its efforts to try to deal with our constitutional responsibilities. First of all, it gratuitously decided to vote on the question of whether or not the President could use peacekeepers in Kosovo. That is not a constitutional prerogative of the Congress. The President as Commander in Chief has the prerogative of deciding where to use troops in noncombat situations. Then, having gratuitously decided to support the placement of those peacekeepers in Kosovo, when the war began this institution then did not step up to its responsibilities to vote on whether or not the combat should proceed. The Senate did. They passed, I believe, the McCain-Warner motion which indicated their support for the ongoing military operation in Kosovo. Then, further compounding its backwards approach to this issue, this House decided today that it was going to stipulate that under no circumstances could ground troops be used in Kosovo. Again, that is not a congressional prerogative. Once you are in a combat situation, it is the President and his military advisers who have the constitutional obligation to determine what the best way is to proceed militarily, whether it is through the use of ground forces, whether it is through the use of air power, whether it is through the use of naval power or a combination of the three. The Congress has the right and an obligation to address the question of whether military activity should proceed, but when they are proceeding it has no right to try to micromanage the combat situations. That is a responsibility of our military leaders and the President. Then, having compounded the confusion by gratuitously getting involved in that issue, it then proceeded to turn down, by one vote, the endorsement of the McCain-Warner language, good bipartisan language with Republican leadership in the other body. It then turned down our obligation to support troops in the field. I just find the way this institution has approached this to be mind-boggling. And now, tomorrow, after they have turned down their authorization for what is going on in Kosovo, we will be marking up the supplemental appropriation bill in the Committee on Appropriations. And guess what? The same crowd that voted ``no'' on authorizing this military operation today will be going into that committee and demanding that we double the amount of money that the President asked to spend on it, taking it from $6 billion to over $13 billion and creating an opportunity to pork up the next year's defense bill in the process. Never, never in the 30 years that I have served here have I seen less vision. Never have I seen less leadership. Never have I seen more confusion. And never have I seen the national interest being left in the dust the way it is tonight. I want to see how many Members of the majority party who today voted against authorizing this operation will tomorrow then demand that we double the amount of spending for the supplemental. It is very clear to me, based on the votes taken here today, that that supplemental appropriation is dead.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I disagree with virtually every word uttered by the previous speaker. The previous vote, in my view, represents an appalling lack of judgment, an appalling lack of will, an appalling lack of leadership, an appalling lack of vision, an appalling abandonment of the national interest, an appalling abandonment of the troops in the field, an appalling lack of bipartisanship. It is a day which this House will profoundly regret.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs.

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct conferees.

Mr. OBEY. Madam 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. Madam Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service and General Government.

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

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, let me say that in the handling of this supplemental appropriation, the Republican majority in this House has given us a case study in how not to proceed. It seems that virtually every time we have an emergency which this Congress is asked to fund, we are being asked by the majority caucus to do one of two things: either to do nothing, or to blow up agreements which had just been reached in the previous year's budget bill by finding offsets to pay for emergency items designated by the administration. Madam Speaker, I would simply observe that if the provisions of the previous year's budget were so easy to reformat, it would not have taken the majority party 2 months into the new fiscal year before they got their work done last year. The decisions that were arrived at in the budget last year were extremely hard to reach. When the administration first provided its request to this Congress to respond to the emergency events in Central America with the greatest natural disaster we had in this century, and when they asked us to deal with what is an emerging emergency in farm country, at first the Committee on Appropriations, under the chairmanship of the gentleman from Florida, produced a proposal which would have had the bipartisan support of this House. It was an honest, practical, sensible way to proceed. We thought we had a bipartisan agreement. Then what happened is that contrary signals were sent from the House leadership to the committee leadership. They said no, throw out that approach and identify offsets, so these items will be funded on a nonemergency basis. What the House did, in my view, was to come up with offsets which could not be more misguided if we had conducted a seminar on how to make mistakes. So we were asked by the majority party to eliminate funding which is necessary for us to have on the table in order to begin discussion with the Russians about how to secure plutonium now in the hands of the Russians so that it does not fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue Nation's, and I think that is a pretty important initiative. Yet we are being asked to sandbag the ability of the administration to begin those discussions by taking that money out. We are also being asked to take out money which the Congress had previously appropriated for callable capital to the international financial institutions, an act which has caused our Secretary of the Treasury to become extremely concerned about the long-term instability which that could bring in dealing with many of our international economic problems. In my judgment, those provisions were dumb enough, but then when this proposal went to the Senate, we saw a congressional version of the movie Dumb and Dumber. What they proceeded to do was to suggest that we ought to cut 43 percent from a number of other items in the budget last year, items which just a few months ago both parties thought were important enough to include in the budget. They suggested that we cut, or the Senate amendment suggested we cut $973 million in funding to correct the Y2K computer problem, which plagues many government agencies, as well as many private businesses. They suggest that we cut more than $200 million from various antiterrorism activities, including $9.3 million in antiterrorism efforts of the FBI and $43 million from the antiterrorism efforts of the Federal Aviation Administration to prevent bombings and other acts of violence against commercial airlines and their passengers. It cuts $288 million from antidrug efforts, including reductions in enforcement activities of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Coast Guard, and the Customs Service. It would have us cut more than $600 million for the improvement of security at U.S. embassies overseas just 1 month after the administration was chastised in three hearings on this side of the Hill for not putting enough money in that item. I have seen people fall off both sides of the same horse, but never at the same moment. Yet, that is what this Congress is doing by the actions that the Senate is trying to take on this conference report. It just seems to me that we ought to resist what they are doing. We have an emergency in Kosovo, and we are hoping that that will be dealt with on a bipartisan basis. We have also had an emergency in our own backyard in the Caribbean with the worst natural disaster that has occurred in this century, and we are trying to do something about that. We are being told that we are going to take 20,000 refugees from Kosovo to try to relieve that situation, and yet we face the prospect of having many times that number of refugees inundate our own country because of the economic collapse that is attendant to the natural disaster which occurred in Central America. Yet that funding is not being called an emergency and it is being delayed by actions taken by this House and the actions taken by the other body. It just seems to me that we ought to recognize an emergency when we see it. We cannot do much today about the fact that the House has already adopted what I consider to be incredibly ill-advised and misguided and certainly, in the case of the Russian plutonium item, a spectacularly destructive act. We cannot prevent the fact that the House has already done that in voting for the offsets that it has voted on. But we certainly should not compound the problem as the Senate amendment does. So, very simply, what this motion does is ask the House to go on record asking the conferees to reject that Senate amendment so that we are not in the ludicrous position of blocking efforts to fix the Y2K computer problems, that we are not in a position of cutting off drug funding, funding about which many Members of this body just a couple months ago were posing for holy pictures, trying to show who is most for drug control efforts. So I would simply say, I do not know any reason why any Member of either party would oppose this motion. We are going to have strong debates in the conference about the ill-advised offsets which this House adopted. But I would think that the House would at least agree that the Senate amendments which were adopted were at least as equally ill-advised and would agree that they ought to be rejected by the conference. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. Let me simply say in closing, Madam Speaker, that I think this Congress needs to recognize that we are facing a genuine emergency in the consideration of this bill. A bunch of people wearing suits on the floor of the House of Representatives, or sport coats, might not think that there is an emergency in farm country, but real live dirt farmers see the fact that world farm prices are at near record low levels; they see that commercial lenders are refusing to extend the credit that is necessary in many instances for farmers to proceed with planting; and they understand why the President thought that this was an emergency and so designated it. I would simply note that it is now the latter part of April and we are just now talking about going to conference on this legislation. It is getting dangerously late for those American farmers. And I would say the situation in Central America is also pressing. Now, many people will ask why should we provide emergency funding because of the Hurricane Mitch problems in Central America. I would simply make the following observation. We spent almost $9 billion in countering what we thought was a military threat in Central America through the funding of the Contras, through the funding of military aid and economic aid to El Salvador and a number of other Central American countries when they were having military problems. But we now run the danger of ignoring what is happening in that region at a time when something is going on which is just as destabilizing and in fact could be more so than the military confrontations that were taking place just a few short years ago. Polls have shown that almost 10 percent of the population of Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador are thinking about leaving their countries and moving north because of the devastation caused by that hurricane. If that happens, we could see over a million people trying to work their way up, either legally or illegally, into this country. If people have a choice of simply standing in the rain or walking in the rain, they are going to start walking north. That could cost this country as much as $7,000 a child for every child who comes into this country. And so it seems to me even if we do not want to focus on the humanitarian obligations we have to our neighbors, it seems to me at least we have a self-interest reason for moving this legislation on and recognizing it for the emergency that it really is. I would urge adoption of the amendment and a recognition that, in general, the offsets which are being proposed both by this body and the other body are ill-advised, counterproductive, and in some cases downright dangerous. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I did not call him stupid, and I do not believe him to be stupid. I called the action taken by this House stupid, and I stand by that statement.

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. I am informed now that I have one additional request for time, and then that will be the last person I yield to on this side on this issue. I just think the record is clear and we need to be reminded of it. This side has not made this supplemental a partisan issue. This side made clear to the gentleman that we were willing to support, on a bipartisan basis, his initial recommendations that he intended to make to the committee and to the House on how we ought to proceed on this supplemental, because the gentleman did correctly recognize that this was an emergency which should be funded on an emergency basis. It was then the gentleman's caucus or his leadership, I am not sure which, who then instructed the majority side of the Committee on Appropriations to take a different route and, instead of seeking common ground with the President and us on this issue, they produced a proposal which they knew we would not buy. I am sorry, but I believe it is downright stupid and dangerous for us to take off the table the money which we need in order to negotiate a settlement with the Russians that will remove the possibility that weapons-grade plutonium, which is now in their hands, will be diverted to other far more dangerous hands. It is stupid and ridiculous for this House to take that position, and yet that is one of the offsets that this House decided to impose on the President. At the very time that we are talking about trying to get the Russians to help in solving the Yugoslav mess, they are yanking off the table the principal carrot that we have to reach agreement on the disposal of the most dangerous material in the universe. Now, there is nothing partisan about that, but there is something very stupid about it. And that is why we are opposed to what the House did. We regret the fact that a proposal, which started out to be bipartisan because of the wise and correct judgments of the gentleman, have now been turned into something else by the determination of the Republican leadership of this House to have yet another unnecessary fight with the President. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez).

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, if we were voting on final passage on the Spratt amendment, I would vote against it, because it and all other budgets before us today pretend that both parties will make deep cuts in health, environment, education, international responsibilities, and defense that in the end neither party, in my view, will accept. But this vote is not to pass the Spratt amendment. It is to substitute the Spratt amendment for the Republican budget, and I will vote to do that. Because, with all of its false premises, it is far less reckless, far more balanced and responsible than the Republican alternative that it amends. Now, why do I say that? It is because I was here in 1981 and I remember the Republicans and a lot of conservative Democrats ramming the disastrous Reagan budgets through this House, which promised that we could double defense spending, provide huge tax cuts aimed at the wealthy, and still balance the budget. Instead, those budgets tripled the deficits and tripled the national debt. And it took us some 19 years to dig out of that hole to the point where a President could finally present a balanced budget to the Congress. I vowed never again will I cooperate in that kind of outrageous activity. But now the Republicans in their approach bring us the same patent medicine snake oil that they gave us in 1981. The Spratt amendment does not. The Spratt amendment extends the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. It is better for veterans. It is better for education. It is better for health care. And in the future, it makes some of the investments that we will need to create greater opportunity for all of our American families. But I caution all of my colleagues. After the budget resolution passes today, they will then face the appropriations process. In that process, I predict that neither party will be willing to vote for the cuts in education, in health care, in agriculture, in veterans, in environmental cleanup, in defense that all of these resolutions promise today. I really believe that Members fundamentally misunderstand what is happening in the budget process, and I would ask this question: Does anybody on this floor really believe that in the end in the appropriations process they will cut 10 percent below current services this year, or 20 to 25 percent below current services in the coming 5 years in some of the program areas I have just described? The answer is very simple. They simply will not do it. The budget process in my view has become fundamentally flawed and phony. It politically rewards phonies. It allows Congress to pretend that it is making cuts at the macro level, which it will never deliver at the micro program level. And we desperately need to change it if we want to bring reality back to the process and integrity back to the debate about budgeting. Unless we do that, the public will not understand a single thing we do here on budgets, and in a democracy, that is unacceptable. And so I would simply say in closing, while I would not support the Spratt amendment if it were final passage because I believe all of these budgets before us today are fundamentally phony, this is by far the most balanced, the most equitable, the most thoughtful in terms of providing the long-term investments that we will eventually need in this country, and I would urge its adoption as a substitute to the Republican vehicle now before us.

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentleman, and I thank the gentleman for the time.

Mr. OBEY

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