Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, because I think this is a colossal waste of time, I, too, yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Let me say, Mr. Speaker, there is not an increase in the LIHEAP program in the manager's amendment. There is an increase from zero. But the program level last year was over a billion dollars. So it is an 85 percent reduction. Thanks for small favors.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I hope that we are not about to spend another couple of fruitless hours. Excuse me, but I have laryngitis, so probably everybody will be happy about that. But the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis) is nodding yes. Mr. Speaker, I want to put this bill in the context of what is happening to the budget in this end-of-the-session snarl that we always appear to get in. Last Friday Senator Byrd was told by Senator Stevens that the process which the majority party would like to follow is as follows: He was told that by Friday the Republican majority would have laid out for all of the bills that were still unsigned, they would lay out what the approximate wishes of the majority party would be on those bills, what the bills would look like if the majority party could write them. They then wanted us to take that paper and come back to them with our honest response about what our differences were that would have to be resolved in order for us to get signed bills, and they were hoping that we would have no more than 10 objections to each bill. We have gotten some information since that time, but we still frankly feel that the basic Johnnie Higgins work has not been done, the basic nitty-gritty work has not been done, in a number of these bills so that we know exactly what it is the majority wants to do. And I think one of the reasons for that is because there is a huge chasm between what the majority wants to do in the Senate and what the majority wants to do in the House. And so we still, even at the staff level, do not have a complete understanding of what it is that the Republican party would like to see on each of the bills in dispute. What we desperately need, if we are going to finish our work, is a complete understanding of where the majority party wants to go on these bills so that we can then sit down, have a clear understanding of what the differences are and work our way towards resolution of those differences. So it has been a very frustrating 2 days. In the midst of that this bill which fell in a heap a week ago because of unilateral judgments on the part of the majority, this bill is now back once again being brought here by unilateral judgments on the part of the majority, and what they have essentially done is to get rid of a number of provisions which had bipartisan support in the House, and now they are going to try to pass the bill with only Republican votes. Well, they can do that if they want, and they may even be able to pass it with only Republican votes, but the fact is that the other remaining issues still remain and this bill will not be finally disposed of until those issues are addressed. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) will in more detail get into the matter of what these amendments are. But it simply seems to me that yesterday we offered the majority this proposition. We said, ``If you drop one of the items that is causing so much controversy and has no bipartisan support, if you drop the item that we feel would gag the ability of the FEC to enforce the law on elections, we would provide the lion's share of our votes in the caucus, and we could easily pass the bill.'' Instead of continuing to pursue a bipartisan approach, the majority party has decided that they are going to take unilateral action to once again try to ram this bill through. All this action does is further delay our ability to resolve the differences between us. It is not the kind of negotiating posture that I would expect from a majority party that tells the press every hour on the hour that they want to get out of here by Saturday. If you want to get out of here by Saturday, they ought to start negotiating like they want to get out of here by Saturday rather than negotiating like they think they have got the next 2 or 3 months to be around here, or we will be around here for the next 2 or 3 months.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would simply say to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. Johnson) that that speech simply will not wash. If you really believe that contraceptive coverage should be provided in this bill, there is only one way to get it: turn the bill down, and bring a bill back which contains it. The majority party was told by people on this side of the aisle that all they had to do to get 200 votes on our side of the aisle for the bill is to drop the amendment on the Federal Elections Commission that threatens to corrupt the entire election process. That is still the best way to cover or to get the contraceptive coverage that she says that she wants. So they can give all the excuses they want about how it is necessary to fund the IRS. Nobody seriously believes the IRS is not going to be funded. It will be funded no matter what happens to this bill. Quit kidding people.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, again, in the interest of fact, I am required to correct the gentleman's previous statements. He says that no one on this side of the aisle has tried to cut unneeded spending. It was not people on this side of the aisle who decided that we should arrange to have a new set of accounting procedures approved so that we could provide $637 million in ships that the Pentagon did not even ask for. This Member personally offered amendments in the defense appropriations bill to eliminate funding for additional C-130s, which were provided purely and simply so that the Congress could provide 7 additional aircraft again that the Pentagon did not even ask for. That decision was made by your committee leadership. This Member certainly did not vote for the highway bill that went through here, which had 1,800 pork barrel projects. To put that in perspective, in the entire 42-year history of the highway program, up until this year, when our party was in control, in 42 years there were a total of 1,042 pork barrel projects. This bill had over 100 in one year alone, including roads to a brew pub and almost $80 million to be spent on a highway in a foreign country. So if I were the gentleman, I would not brag too much about the discipline shown on that side of the aisle on legislation like that. Mr. Speaker, I make no apology for saying that I believe that more funding in the Federal budget should have been put in this bill so that we did not have to cut education $2 billion below the President's level. I believe that we should have provided those after-school centers to keep juveniles out of trouble and under adult supervision. I believe we should be funding higher levels for children's mental health. When we see kids shooting each other in school yards around the country, I believe that we should not be eliminating the summer youth program that gives millions or hundreds of thousands of young people their first exposure to the world of work. And I certainly do not believe that we ought to continue to deny the President's top education priority, which is the reduction of class size by adding new teachers in the first 3 grades. This bill does all of that, and that is why it seems to me that we should vote against the rule because a vote for this rule is a vote to endorse the bill which Senate Republicans have already indicated is at least $3 billion below where it ought to be in order to provide a balanced set of priorities for the people we are supposed to represent.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would like to respond to something my good friend from Illinois said a couple minutes earlier. He indicated that the reason that we are stuck with this miserable bill is because both parties agreed to the limitations that have produced this bill. That is not correct. It is true that the leaders of both parties voted for a budget last year which imposed limits, of course. But then, under the process when the appropriation bills came to the floor this year, the Republican committee leadership chose, alone, without consulting us on this side of the aisle, how they would divide that money between the 13 subcommittees, and it is clear that the committee leadership on the Republican side of the aisle decided to take money out of this bill and give it to other subcommittees so that they would have an easier time passing bills favored by the majority leadership, leaving this bill holding the bag. That is why we are now stuck with a bill which even the Republican leadership in the Senate says is at least $3 billion below where it should be. Now, we know that. We heard them say that just yesterday. So it is not just us saying that this bill is inadequate; your own party brethren in the Senate are saying the same thing. So all I would say is that we need to recognize the fact that we did not agree on this side of the aisle to cut education $2 billion below the President's level. We did not agree that we should eliminate funding for low income heating assistance and summer jobs programs, the 2 programs that deal most directly with the least fortunate people in this society. Those decisions were made unilaterally on the other side of the aisle, and those are the decisions to which we object. That is why, while I have great respect and affection for the gentleman from Illinois, I think he has done the very best job he can defending a very bad case. It seems to me that a vote for this rule is an endorsement of each and every one of the cuts in this bill which I predict will be repudiated on both sides of the aisle within the next 2 weeks. There is no reason to bring this charade to the floor, and I urge a ``no'' vote on the rule.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield two minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), a member of the subcommittee.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tierney).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Rahall).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I am taking this special order because earlier today, without notice to anyone on our side of the aisle, the House considered the rule under which the Labor, Health, Education appropriations bill would be brought to the floor. I believe that that issue should be discussed before the House votes, because I think it is ridiculous for any Member of this House to vote for a rule that makes this bill in order. I want to make clear, first of all, that the bill this rule would make in order is going absolutely nowhere. The bill that comes to the floor makes huge reductions in education, in job training, in a number of health programs that both parties claim that they are for. And yet at the very time that we are supposed to be debating this bill, the conferees, the lead conferees, have already been meeting in Senator Specter's office yesterday, and I participated in those meetings for over 3 hours. We are in the process of putting together a different bill, which will be at least $3 billion above the bill being brought to the floor and, in my judgment, considerably above that level before we are done. So this is a sham bill. If it is brought up it will be merely to take up time that would more usefully be used for other purposes. Secondly, I would point out that if this rule is adopted, a vote for this rule will simply be an endorsement for a bill that fails our children and hurts workers to an extreme degree. This bill, for instance, eliminates the Low Income Heating Assistance Program, which is the key program that helps low-income seniors avoid having to choose between heating their houses and eating. This bill would eliminate the summer jobs program that gives some young people in this country their first experience at dealing with the world of work. This bill slashes the President's request for new funding for after- school centers to try to give young people a useful place to go, recognizing that the vast majority of juvenile crime occurs in after- school hours, and many times before parents get home and can have a place for their kids to come home to. It cuts reading and math help for 520,000 Title I kids below the President's budget. It denies anti-drug coordinators for 6,500 middle schools with the worst drug and violence problems. It block grants, and then cuts by $300 million, Eisenhower teacher training programs and Goals 2000 programs. It cuts OSHA workplace safety enforcement and undermines worker protections. It does absolutely nothing to lower class size in the first three grades, one of the President's top initiatives. So, in my view, there is absolutely no substantive reason to bring this bill to the floor, because this bill is so bad and guts so many national priorities that even the Republican allies of House Members on the other side of the Capitol, in the Senate, recognize that this bill is so extreme that they will not even bring it to the Senate floor for a vote. So a vote for this rule today is a vote for extremism on these issues. It will be taken seriously by nobody because this bill is going nowhere. It is a simple waste of our time. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Rodriguez).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Porter) be allowed to allocate 15 minutes of the 30 minutes remaining.

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

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, it is getting a little deep in here. Let me simply say that I want to express my affection for the gentleman from New Mexico and my great respect for the gentlewoman from Ohio, and I regret that I have to oppose their bill, but I want to explain why I am doing that. Mr. Speaker, I think there are four very good reasons to vote ``no'' on this bill. First of all, this bill blocks the ability of Secretary of Agriculture Glickman to propose even the smallest reform of the ancient, outmoded and disgracefully discriminatory milk marketing order system. I do not think it ought to do that, and that is one reason I am voting against it. Secondly, this bill is a very expensive admission that the Freedom to Farm bill is a spectacular failure and it has in fact become the freedom-to-fail-at-farming bill. Last year, the farm bill provided some $36 billion in transition payments to farmers who are moving their way into the wonderful new world of no safety net. Despite that fact, this bill now recognizes the need to add billions more, because the bottom has dropped out of the market. That is a confession of failure. I think people ought to recognize that. The problem, however, is that while those grain farmers are getting multibillion dollar payments from the government for the next number of years, when I asked the conferees to provide transition payments for dairy farmers that were only 4 percent as large as those transition payments for grain farmers, we were turned down flat by unanimous vote of the Republican House conferees. If that had been provided, dairy farmers would have gotten an extra 50 cents per hundred weight this year, a small amount, but certainly it would have been welcome. Thirdly, the conferees then threw beef farmers overboard. There are three companies who control 80 percent of the market in the meat packing industry. They know with perfect understanding what the prices are that they are offering the farmers. But farmers are dispersed and they do not know what the real price is that they can get in the marketplace. We tried to get that corrected by having mandatory price reporting. Again, the House Republican conferees turned that down unanimously, even though it had been supported on a bipartisan basis in the Senate. Then look at the fact that this bill turned its back on consumers in two ways. First of all, the Senate, again on a bipartisan basis, proposed country-of-origin food labeling on beef because of concerns about problems such as E. coli. Again, the Republican House conferees unanimously turned that down. We then tried to pass the Senate bipartisan proposal to provide country-of-origin food labeling for fruits and vegetables because we had a cyclosporia outbreak with raspberries from Guatemala and we had hepatitis outbreak because of strawberries from Mexico. Again, Republican House conferees unanimously blocked that bipartisan initiative in the Senate. Given the fact that we only inspect 2 percent of the fruits and vegetables that come into this country for pathogens, it seems to me that is the least that Congress could have done, but they chose not to do it. Therefore, I am simply going to urge a no vote on this bill. There are many good provisions in the bill, but there are also many cases where the conferees simply gave in to the processors or continued grossly discriminatory pricing practices, and they certainly walked away from the consumer protection actions that they should have taken on these country-of-origin provisions. So I am going to vote no, and I would urge others to do likewise.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this rule should not be before us tonight and neither should this bill. The conference report was just signed about an hour ago, and now under a martial law approach it is before the House. No Member has had a chance to examine what is in that conference report, and there is one provision in the conference report which is absolutely outrageous. The best way to deal with that is to simply defeat this rule. This bill, pure and simple, if this rule is approved, will put the general counsel of the Federal Elections Commission out of business come January. Section 514 of the bill establishes term limits for the general counsel and the staff director of the Federal Elections Commission by requiring an affirmative vote of 4 of the 6 commissioners every 4 years. This is a blatant Republican political maneuver aimed at removing the Federal Elections Commission's current general counsel, Lawrence Noble. Why? Because during his tenure, Mr. Noble has aggressively sought to enforce election laws and has been willing to punish violators of the law from across the political spectrum. The Federal Election Commission's general counsel, Mr. Noble, suggested that the FEC crack down on soft money, because he has had to take some of these cases to court recently; for example, GOPAC and the Christian Coalition. Section 514 would undermine the bipartisan nature of the Commission by requiring the Commission to reappoint the staff director and the general counsel every 4 years by an affirmative vote of 4. That means, in plain English, a vote along party lines would enable the commissioners of either party to dismiss the senior staff. That is wrong, and that is why editorial boards and reform minded organizations throughout the country have rightly attacked this provision as an attempt to further weaken the Federal Elections Commission and ensure that the election laws go unenforced. The New York Times recently stated, ``This change is nothing more than an attempt to install a do nothing enforcement staff.'' In my judgment, what this would do is simply require the counsel to deal with kid gloves in dealing with either party, because if they did not satisfy both parties they would not stand a chance of being reappointed. The best way to satisfy both parties, obviously, is to do nothing, and that is not what we need in the Federal Elections Commission. We do not need a pussycat. We need a tough tiger. We do not need a paper tiger at the FEC, but this is a prescription for creating just that. The recent Washington Post editorial comment was correct. It said that this FEC provision is, ``In keeping with the rest of the record on campaign finance this year. The unifying theme has been hypocrisy.'' Section 514 is an unwarranted retaliatory provision aimed at undermining the professionalism and independence of the Federal Election Commission general counsel's office. It ought to be rejected. This Congress ought to be standing for election reform. It should not be putting impediments in the way of further election reform, and that is what it does when it disarms the Federal Election Commission. There are many good provisions in this bill, but this is not one of them. The best way to correct the problem is defeat this rule, and have the committee go back to conference and eliminate this and other egregious provisions that Members may be concerned about. I urge a ``no'' vote on the rule.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, let us not kid ourselves: This does not have diddly-squat to do with term limits. What you want to do is to make sure that you can dismiss whoever is the general counsel of the FEC by a simple party line vote. That is what the proposal does. The only way the general counsel can stay in office under those conditions is if he rolls over and place kissy-face with both political parties. We do not need an Election Commission that does that. We need an Election Commission that is going to police both parties, not one that is going to cave in to both parties, and you know very well that is exactly what this provision does. Quit kidding people.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection. Mr. SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from New York?

Mr. OBEY. Reserving the right to object, Mr. Speaker, I would like to make certain that there is an understanding that on Monday there will be no votes before 5 p.m.

Mr. OBEY. Further reserving the right to object, I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, in the interest of saving the time of the House, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my request for a roll call vote on the Tiahrt amendment.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. There is no objection to this continuing resolution on this side of the aisle. The resolution is perfectly reasonable. It is a straight, neutral continuation of funding, and it is essential in order to keep the government open. The President will sign it. He has made that quite clear in the statement he sent this morning, and I think every Member of the House, if there is a vote on this, ought to vote for it. Having said that, I think it is regrettable that we have been brought here by an unhappy set of circumstances. Last year we had a considerable degree of bipartisan cooperation between both parties, and as a result, we achieved I think some real substantive victories for the American people, something which this House on both sides of the aisle can take pride in, and we had an extremely civil year of doing the people's business. Everyone understands that the gentleman from Louisiana and I have a very good personal relationship. I consider him to be one of the best friends I have in the House and one of the best legislators in the House. I am proud of that relationship. However, there have been many external factors which have operated to make our job much more difficult this year. We have, in my view, instead of seeing a mindset of cooperation from the majority caucus, this year we have had much more of a mindset of confrontation on at least half of the appropriation bills that have moved through this House. Under the law, we are supposed to have the budget resolution passed by the time we have our summer break, and we are supposed to have all 13 appropriation bills passed by October 1. We are in the situation, and this has not happened, I do not believe, since I have been here, where we still do not have a budget resolution passed. So we are operating on an ad hoc basis because of that. That makes it more difficult for this committee to do its work. It is not unprecedented for the House not to finish all of its appropriation bills before October 1. We were fortunate enough that we were able to do that the year that I was chairman. That was not because of any special action taken by me or by my committee. We did have a very good bipartisan working relationship that year. But we also had the leadership of both parties working together along with the White House to make it happen. We have not seen that this year, unfortunately. So as a consequence, not a single appropriation bill has yet been signed into law. I think I need to cite some of the reasons for that. First of all, the majority has chosen to produce a Labor, Health, Education, and Social Services bill which was so extreme in its nature that they have not been able to pass it in this House. The Senate, their Senate Republican counterparts have produced a significantly more moderate bill; still not what we need to have a signed product. But the very act of restoring some of the funding that the Senate has restored for programs like low income heating assistance and summer jobs, that very act demonstrates that the majority in the other body recognizes that the Labor, Health, Education appropriation bill produced by the majority in this House is so extreme that they do not want anything to do with it. On the Veterans Administration, HUD, EPA bill, that bill should have been on the President's desk. It has a number of problems associated with it which are solvable; but, yet, that bill has been thrown into turmoil because of the insistence of the majority that they attach a totally irrelevant housing authorization bill, a huge bill which the authorizing committee has not been able to get through the Congress. So they lay it onto the appropriation bill, asking the Committee on Appropriations to carry that extra freight, and that is more freight than the system will bear. So that has broken down. On interior, the bill that funds most of our natural treasurers and the preservation and stewardship of those treasures on an annual basis, that bill has been loaded down with extreme environmental riders in the other body, unnecessary roads through wilderness areas, additional logging of the Tongass. I was in Alaska last year. I was horrified when I overflew the Tongass and some of the other areas and saw some of the extreme clear- cutting that have been going on by the native corporations up there. That had not fit my impression of what had been happening up there. We had a bill on the interior appropriation bill that would make that matter worse on the transportation appropriation bill. Again, we have seen an antienvironmental rider added, which takes a bill which ought to have been relatively noncontroversial. I was very surprised that that bill had not been sent to the President a long time ago. But riders like that have held that bill up as well. Agriculture. This Congress or rather the previous Congress voted for the horrendous so-called Freedom to Farm Bill which has turned into a Freedom-to-Fail-at-Farming bill because of the lack of a safety net that is provided for American farmers in that legislation. It is obvious the majority party does not know how to deal with that, so that appropriation bill is hung up also. That matter is then made worse by the refusal of the majority party to support funding for the IMF so that we can provide some additional stability in our export markets so that we have a greater ability to export our agricultural products to those areas. Yet, we are being denied an opportunity in this House even to vote on that crucial issue. The District of Columbia appropriation bill has been held up by a gratuitous decision on the part of this body to insist that the District of Columbia engage in an experiment on educational vouchers which many of us would not support if that were mandated on our own local districts. Then we come to the foreign operations bill. That bill in the past has been handled on a bipartisan basis, and the bill has largely been worked out before it has come to the floor. This time, for a variety of reasons, that has not happened, despite the agreement that was voiced in the Committee on Appropriations that the majority would have its language in the bill on the Mexico City family planning issue. We were told that, as part of that agreement, if we did not try to take the language out of the bill, we would have, on this side of the aisle an opportunity for an alternative to be offered so that we could have an up or down vote on the two viewpoints on that issue. The gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) has been blocked from having a clean shot at an alternative. In addition to that, the Committee on Rules is preventing us from even having a vote on the IMF. That vote is central to helping to stabilize international exchange rates, to stabilize the international trading arrangements so that we have an opportunity to try to do something about the deep recession which is plaguing at least one-third of the world and threatens to cripple our own economic recovery. So we have had all kinds of these gratuitous roadblocks put in the way of our getting our business done. I would say it appears to me that this Congress has done an extensive job of investigating but a pitiful job of legislating when it comes to meeting the primary responsibility this Congress has each year, which is to keep the government open by funding the basic activities of government through the appropriations process. This committee has once again been thrown into the briar patch on many issue that we do not have the expertise to deal with and do not have the jurisdiction to deal with it. I would point out also that, well I will not comment on the Korean situation until we get the foreign ops bill up, but I just have to say this, I am disturbed by the fact that virtually none of these bills are really moving. It seems to me that there is a conscious decision on the part of a number of the players to want to push their bills into a giant omnibus appropriation bill at the end so that they can send a huge vehicle to the President and on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. I hope that is not true because that is the way that we get into an awful lot of trouble around here. We need to be trying to work out these individual bills. We do not need a situation to be developed where the Congress tries to take advantage of what the majority party may see as the perceived weakening of the President's position and use that to try to ram at him and stick in his ear a whole range of outrageous propositions that they know he is certainly not willing to accept, as we are not willing to accept. So I would simply say that I think the committee is doing the responsible thing in bringing this continuing resolution to the floor in the shape it is in. I do not think that the process by which we have gotten here has been particularly responsible. That is not the chairman's fault, but I do want to say that I expect we are going to have to have a number of additional short-term continuing resolutions because it certainly seems to me that it is not likely that we will have our work done for the next fiscal year by the time this pending continuing resolution expires in early October. I hope that there is a willingness to stay in session this year until our job is done on these bills. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.