Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, to enable the House to discuss an item in the classified annex to this bill, I offer a motion.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. All I would say, I would simply make an observation that what we are doing in this legislation today is reimbursing farmers for the loss of animals. That is fine. I do not disagree with that. However, unfortunately, we are not going to be reimbursing families for the loss of housing for their grandparents. I do not think that is fine. But nonetheless, the Congress will work its wondrous ways as it usually does, often with the national interests being damaged in the process. I am sorry about that, but I guess that is the way it goes. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. Let me simply say that I know that the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) was also interested in this amendment and contacted me numerous times on it. I personally have no problem with the action taken by the gentleman in his amendment to provide additional community development block grant assistance in the Northeast. My only problem with this amendment, again, is that I do not like the fact that we are cutting an additional $20 million out of housing for the most needy human beings in this country. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Baldacci).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, yes, I do.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Meek).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis). (Mr. DAVIS of Illinois asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I need to go up to the Committee on Rules. I would ask that the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) be allowed to control my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, the previous speaker talked about wasteful Washington spending. I do not consider enabling senior citizens to have housing in my hometown or anybody else's hometown in the countryside to be wasteful Washington spending. I consider those to be necessary mercy initiatives so good and decent low-income Americans and retired senior citizens can live in decent housing. I do not consider providing funding to persons who are willing to give of their time to assist with finding volunteers to deal with our kids after school so that they are in a safe place and are not committing crime is wasteful Washington spending. I call that good community activity. I would point out that the rule the gentleman just voted for precluded us from attacking real wasteful spending. It precluded me from offering the amendment which would have reduced by 5 percent the Pentagon account that allows the Pentagon to pay $76 for a 57-cent set screw, and allows the Pentagon to pay $38,000 for aircraft springs that they previously paid $1,500 for. That is true wasteful Washington spending, I would submit to the gentleman from Wisconsin, and it is the kind of wasteful spending the gentleman protected with his vote for the rule. Parliamentary Inquiry

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) the distinguished ranking member of the Committee on National Security.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota. (Mr. VENTO asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 8 minutes. Mr. Chairman, 3 years ago, as every American knows, this Congress was a snake pit of confrontation. There was one fight after another between the Congress and the White House, which led to a sustained government shutdown. It took a long time for the reputation of this Congress to recover from that obstreperousness. Last year, in contrast, I felt we had a pretty good year in the appropriations process. Most of the time the appropriations bills were dealt with on a bipartisan basis. I think that that made people in the country feel better about their government. I think it made us feel a whole lot better about it. I think it made us feel a whole lot better about each other, because we were able to work out differences after we had defined those differences. We were able to find a common solution to many of those questions. This year, unfortunately, we now seem to be walking right back into the confrontation mode. There have been numerous stories in the press reporting that those in the majority party caucus with the more militant attitude on political matters simply want the Congress to take the President on, on a whole range of issues. So as a result, this bill, which ought to be an emergency appropriation which goes through rather quickly, this bill is going to take a long time to get out of the Congress, out of conference. When it gets to the President, it is going to be vetoed in its present form. That makes no sense, because we have a great deal of work to do. We have a very few days left in the legislative schedule to do it. Let us take a look at the points of controversy in this bill. First of all, this bill refuses to appropriate 75 percent of the disaster assistance requested by the President. Now, the President does not ask for that money because he likes to ask for money. He asks for it because we have had a series of natural disasters around the country. Unless we are not going to help communities recover, we need to provide this money. The President has asked for more money than we have in this bill because he understands that with the funding of the disasters that we have already had, if we have any significant storm activity in the summer, we will not have the money in the till to help the communities who need help on the dime, immediately. Yet, despite the fact that on a bipartisan basis the Senate committee, under the leadership of the chairman of that committee, Senator Stevens, despite the fact that the Senate added the full amount of the President's request, the majority party in this House refuses to provide that same funding. Then in a second effort to establish confrontation with the President, the House majority party insists that to the President's request it add large cuts in housing, which will cut 20 percent of the funds that are needed next year to sign the contracts to sustain the living quarters for low-income Americans and senior citizens who are now living in subsidized housing around the country. One-third of the persons who will be forced out of those homes, if this action occurs, are elderly. That is a great Easter gift for this Congress to give those folks before we go home on 20 days recess. Then it says we are going to cut $75 million for bilingual education. I did not used to care about that issue as much as I do now. But now I have had a huge influx of H'Mong population into my hometown and other communities. The H'Mong are the folks who did our dirty work during the war in Laos. They did the CIA's undercover dirty work. So the Federal Government made a decision to allow them to come into this country. But now the Federal Government is bugging out on its responsibility to help train them and educate them. They do not even have a written language, so they are very hard to teach English. Yet, one of the programs that would help us do that is being shrunk by a very large amount by this action. Then we come to the IMF. Nobody likes to come in here and ask for money for the International Monetary Fund. But the fact is we live in the real world, and if we do not defend ourselves in that real world, we are going to suffer the consequences. Japan has been running an irresponsible fiscal policy for years. That and other actions finally led to a currency collapse in Asia. There is a huge overproductive capacity in this world in certain industries, a lot of it in Asia. Because of that currency collapse, a lot of very cheap goods which are artificially underpriced because of that currency collapse are going to shortly be under way to the United States to undercut American goods. We are going to see plants close. We are going to see American workers go out of work. We are going to see the largest trade deficit in the history of the world. Yet, this Congress is choosing to do nothing whatsoever about it by holding the IMF hostage to a nongermane proposal. Then what we find is that the Speaker of the House is reported in a number of press accounts to have threatened majority party Members of the Committee on Appropriations with the loss of their committee assignments if they do not follow the leadership's so-called strategy on this issue. I do not understand why anyone thinks that it is for the good of America that we resurrect a confrontational attitude rather than a cooperative attitude in this Congress. I do not understand even how politically people think that that is going to win votes in an election year. I do not think it is. So I regretfully and respectfully ask the House to turn this bill down. I know that the pragmatists on the majority side of the aisle did not want to see this confrontation occur, but they have been overruled. I regret that. Until such time as reason prevails, we have no choice but to ask Members to vote against this proposal. That is what I am asking Members to do.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Stokes), the distinguished ranking member of the most effective HUD subcommittee.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Baldacci).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Gephardt), minority leader. (Mr. GEPHARDT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, for the reasons I have stated, since we were given no consideration whatsoever in our desire to offer even a single amendment to this amendment, I object to the unanimous consent request.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I understand the gentleman's concern, but with all due respect, we wanted the debate structured, too. We wanted to have a structured debate on offsets. We wanted to have a structured debate on the fact that this rule does not allow 75 percent of the President's request. We wanted a structured rule, too. We were not given that. Under those circumstances, I do not see why I should accommodate this request when we were turned down on every single request that we made to structure the rule.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, we have just had a rule passed which denied the minority an opportunity to offer any significant amendment whatsoever. It is a rule that I strenuously opposed and asked the House to turn down. Now I understand that the gentleman is asking unanimous consent that some other arrangement be agreed to other than that in the rule. I, for the life of me, do not understand why we ought to do that. If Members did not like the rule, then I wish they would have followed my request and voted against it as I did.