Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, for the benefit of Members, I want to make clear that it is the intention of the committee to proceed no further than the end of title II tonight.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, today, I would like to salute two outstanding young women who have been honored with the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. Gold Award by the Indian Waters Girl Scout Council in Eau Claire, WI. They are Carrie Shufelt and Carrie Meyer. They are being honored for earning the highest achievement award in Girl Scouting. The Girl Scout Gold Award symbolizes outstanding accomplishments in the areas of leadership, community service, career planning, and personal development. Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., an organization serving over 2.6 million girls, has awarded more than 20,000 Girl Scout Gold Awards to Senior Girl Scouts since the inception of the program in 1980. To receive the award, a Girl Scout must fulfill five requirements: earn four interest project patches, earn the Career Exploration pin, earn the Senior Girl Scout Leadership Award project, earn the Senior Girl Scout Challenge, and design and implement a Girl Scout Gold Award project. A plan for fulfilling the requirements of the award is created by the Senior Girl Scout and is carried out through close cooperation between the girl and an adult Girl Scout volunteer. The earning of the Girl Scout Gold Award is a major accomplishment for these young women, and I believe they should receive the public recognition due them for this significant service to their community and their country.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I will never forget running into a woman in Stevens Point in my district. She was about 90 years old. The only thing that kept her going was the fact that she was living in a home that was built for her by her husband as a wedding present when she was 22 years old. She lived in a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Everything else was boarded up. She slept on an old, beat-up couch. It was the weatherization program that made it possible for that woman to have some meaning in her life. For us to take that away, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. This amendment should pass. It is about time we put people ahead of theory. It is about time we put people ahead of nickles.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer a preferential motion.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I do not intend to take the 5 minutes, but I do simply want to express my frustration about the fact that this amendment need be here at all. I supported the proposal last year which allowed timber companies to get at what we were told was salvage, and I think it was a rational thing to try to do. My problem is that, as has been indicated by a number of speakers today, that proposal wound up allowing a lot more than was advertised, and a lot more than it was explained as doing, because in addition to allowing legitimate salvage, it also would up allowing about 50 percent of the timber that was taken from those areas to in fact be green timber. That creates a dilemma for people like me who want to see to it that we do not simply allow timber to rot on the ground, and yet we also do not want to see every environmental law in the country waived in order to enable people to get at live trees. So I would simply use this motion to say to anyone interested in the issue on the floor, that in the future when issues like this arise, it would be very good for both sides if legislation which is proposed actually does what it is advertised as doing, because I am confident if that proposition in fact had been limited simply to straight salvage, as the House was told it was, we would not have had much of the controversy that has surrounded this ever since.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio?

Mr. OBEY. Reserving the right to object, Mr. Chairman, what is the request?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I am reluctant to object, but given the fact that this involves taking money out of roads, I do object.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, what was the unanimous-consent request?

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I am informed by staff that the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Yates] also had an amendment that he offered in committee which lost by one vote that relates to telecommunications. I do not know where on that list that amendment ought to be placed, but I would urge the gentleman to amend the motion to make certain that that is provided for for 5 minutes on each side.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I object.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, 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. Mr. Chairman, with the end of the cold war, the Navy acknowledges that they have no military requirement for an additional nuclear attack submarine. At the present time we are cutting up dozens of submarines, including a number of Los Angeles class submarines, but the Navy nonetheless decided that they were going to proceed to spend billions of dollars to build a new attack submarine because they wanted to maintain the industrial base. That is not a bad reason. I do not argue with that. But the fact is that from there on, what the Pentagon wanted to do has been sidetracked by the Congress and by the authorizing committee. DOD essentially wanted to build two submarines. They paid for one last year. They wanted to do another one, not this year but the coming year after this, but the committee instead decided what they wanted them to do is to build four different prototype submarines. End result: We are going to be spending $4 billion more than the Pentagon wanted us to spend to determine what kind of attack submarines we ought to be building in the future. My amendment simply removes $404 million to eliminate the congressional expansion of what was originally a limited Department of Defense decision in terms of proceeding with the construction of attack submarines. Mr. Chairman, there is absolutely no reason why we are building more than two submarines except pork. The only reason is that we have a competition between a number of shipyards, Connecticut and Virginia being the two in question here, and as a result, we are going to wind up keeping both happy at an additional cost of $4 billion. Mr. Chairman, when this bill is done today, we are going to go over to the Rayburn Building and we are going to be voting on the Labor, Health, Education bill that requires us to squeeze education, squeeze student loans, squeeze job training, squeeze social services, and yet we are buying into, in this bill, the idea that we ought to proceed with this expanded acquisition of attack submarines. That does not make any financial sense, it does not make military sense; it may make a lot of political sense for the people involved in the decision, but it is a cockamamie way to go about meeting a threat that does not even exist. Mr. Chairman, I would suggest that is all there is to the argument. People will know where they are going to come from. I do not see any reason to take more time. I would simply urge the Members, if they are interested in meeting the requirement laid down by DOD, rather than meeting the political requirement laid down by the Congress, they will save $404 million by voting for this amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote and, pending that, I make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, I do not want to impose on the House a lengthy explanation, but essentially what I am trying to do is to eliminate six C-130-J airplanes from this bill because we can save $10 million a year by waiting until next year to buy the same six planes. So that is basically what I am trying to do with the amendment, and I do not really much care how much time we have on the amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I have in my hand, as Senator McCarthy from my home State used to say, a pork barrel catalog. What happened this year is that the authorizing committee asked the various services at the Pentagon to prepare a list of projects in the authorization bill, by Member of Congress, indicating what the economic impact would be for each of the items in the bill in each Member's congressional district. They were also asked to estimate how many jobs were created by the projects in each Member's congressional district. Again, there is nothing wrong with that. But what this amendment says is very simple, and I offer it with absolutely no expectation it will be adopted because I understand how much pressure thee is on this bill. But nonetheless, the amendment says something very simple: It simply says if there is a project in this bill and if the military says it has no military value, that it has no documented military requirement under their formal mission needs statement process, and, second, if it is so extremely high in cost, as defined by this pork catalog put together by the national security authorizing committee, that the cost per job of that project would exceed $100,000, then we should not do it. That is all it says.

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

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, let me simply say that I will simply repeat what the amendment does, because I do not know how else to make clear that it is so simple. What this amendment says is that if there is a project in the bill which has no documented military requirement under their formal mission needs statement process, and if any project is so high in cost per job that it exceeds $100,000 per job as defined by this project which was requested by the House authorizing committee, that they simply not proceed with the project. That is all it says. I make no value judgment about anyone's project in this bill. This applies to all procurement except Guard and Reserve. All I am saying is that if there is no mission needs statement for the project in question, and when they total up the total number of jobs created by the project and divide it into the total number of dollars for the project, if that cost exceeds $100,000 per job, they do not go ahead with it. It seems to me that that is a rational thing to do. I did not ask each service to provide this information. The gentleman did. I have a copy of a letter from the Navy to a person who I believe is his staffer, Mr. Steve Thompson, dated May 13, transmitting this information, so he knows as much about it as I do.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, what level would the gentleman from California feel is appropriate?

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I do not think I will take the full 5 minutes, but I did want to take some time to suggest that this bill today has two fundamental problems: First of all, it is, in my view, reflective of a view that somehow the United States is under serious duress and, in fact, is falling behind potential military competitors. The fact is, it is not. The fact is that right now we spend two-and- a-half times as much as all of our military adversaries combined and this bill will add to that lead, not subtract from it. Second, I would like to point out that a little known fact about the defense budget is that while both parties are talking about proceeding to balance the budget in 7 years, the fact is that by the seventh year the defense budget, reflected by the budget resolution that passed yesterday, the majority party's defense budget, is in fact lower than the budget provided by the President. Yet, at the same time that these outyear numbers are substantially lower than the President's, for the first 2 or 3 years this committee is insisting on adding billions of dollars above the President's request. That makes absolutely no sense. It means that we will be continuing to avoid the tough choices that are needed on the kind of weapons that are going to be bought, and as long as we avoid those tough decisions, it means that we will be buying more than we can afford just a few years down the line. That will mean that if the Congress, in fact, sticks to its outyear budget ceilings it will be forced to either cancel programs or make substantial reductions in operation and maintenance and other key items at a later point in the cycle, precisely at the time when we ought to be not doing that. That is why Secretary of Defense Perry has described what is happening as a catastrophe, and that is why it is important to understand that this is not just an argument between the traditional doves and hawks, it is not just an argument about whether this budget ought to spend more money or less money. It is an argument about whether or not it makes sense to grossly inflate the military budget today when we know that we will have to produce substantial reductions in the outyears to meet the targets under the budget resolution. I submit to my colleagues that we are fooling ourselves and the American people when we pass legislation such as this, and I do not think we should do it. I will, during the course of the debate, be offering a number of amendments to try to bring it in line, but I think it is important, before we begin the debate on the amendment process, to understand the context in which those amendments are offered. As I have said, the context is that, very clearly, this bill is jamming far too much money into the bill the first 2 or 3 years of this so-called 7-year budget cycle. It will require all kinds of reductions 3 and 4 years down the line. We could make our job a whole lot easier in the future if we would make the choices today that, unfortunately, this committee has refused to make.