Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

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

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

Mr. OBEY. Reserving the right to object, Mr. Speaker, let me simply say that I do not intend to object. The gentleman has consulted on this side of the aisle, and I think that the process which he has in mind for bringing up this resolution is the correct one. We do not necessarily like the result that flows from it, but I think it is in order to facilitate its consideration at a later point today, so I have no objection.

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, today, I would like to salute an outstanding young woman, Elizabeth Fox, who has been honored with the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. Gold Award by the Indian Waters Girl Scout Council in Eau Claire, WI. She is 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. For the Girl Scout Gold Award project, Elizabeth organized a stuffed animal drive in her community and donated the toys to local time-out shelters. For her project, Elizabeth assessed the needs of her community, developed a plan to address one specific area in need, and followed through with the project to completion. The organizational and communications skills she developed through the project will benefit her throughout her life, and Elizabeth's dedication to Eau Claire will benefit the community for a long time to come. The earning of the Girl Scout Gold Award is a major accomplishment for Elizabeth Fox, and I believe she should receive the public recognition due her for this significant service to her community and her country.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Bonior], the distinguished minority whip.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend for yielding, but I would suggest if you are going to point out the history of the Senate, that you point out the complete and accurate history of the Senate. The fact is that there were objections to consideration of that bill from both sides of the aisle, not just once, but many times more than once, on both sides of the aisle, as we both well now know.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, let us take a look at what the effect of that would be on the local school districts. You would require local school districts to lay off 40,000 teachers. Am I going to support a unanimous-consent request for that? Absolutely not. It means you would nail in the large reductions in Federal support for School to Work programs. Am I going to support a unanimous-consent request to do that? Absolutely not. It means you would nail in the huge reductions in enforcement for environmental cleanup. You think I am going to support a unanimous- consent request to do that? Absolutely not. I will offer a unanimous-consent request to eliminate some of the abuses of funding which the gentleman claimed he was concerned about last week, but I am not going to support a unanimous-consent request that will tell schoolteachers that 40,000 of you are going to get pink slips so you can continue to provide tax cuts in your budget for very wealthy people making over $200,000 a year. If you want to offer a responsible unanimous-consent request, I will be happy to entertain it. But it is not responsible to suggest that local school districts should lay off 40,000 teachers because you've got a political dispute within the leadership of the Republican Party in this House. That is not responsible and the gentleman knows that. So let me simply say that what is at stake here is whether or not we are going to vote for a continuing resolution which cooperates in the strategy by which we tell working families, for instance, that we are going to raise the cost of their getting student loans by $10 billion over the next 7 years. We are not going to cooperate in that kind of an agenda. What ought to happen here is very simple. Instead of bringing these silly, stop- and-go, week-by-week extensions to the floor, what my colleagues ought to do is go into that conference and recognize they need to restore funding for the NLRB, they need to more fully restore funding for education. They need to fully restore more funding for environmental cleanup. They need to buy into some of the offsets that the administration has suggested to pay for those programs. They need to drop the extraneous special interest language which is going to let timber companies rip up the Tongass Forest, which is going to allow other special interests to get away with murder in the environmental field. And they need to rip up some of the other special interest language that they have attached to these appropriation bills. Mr. Speaker, that is what the President is asking for. That is the rational thing to do. That is what they ought to do rather than running the risk every week that the Government is going to shut down again.

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

Mr. OBEY. Is the gentleman making a unanimous-consent request to play the tape again so we can stop going through this charade?

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would agree to that request.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Speaker, we do not have either the President's budget or the Republican budget before us today. What we have before us is a proposition which continues the reduced funding levels of education and environmental protection which will threaten the environmental future of the country and the educational future of our children. That is what is before us today. But if we are going to mention the President's budget, let me simply point out the gentleman can say all he wants about how too many of the budget cuts in the President's budget are in the outyears. Mr. Speaker, let me simply point out that in the seventh year of the budget which my colleague voted for, the budget reductions in the seventh year in the Republican budget are larger in the seventh year than they are in President Clinton's. Now, my colleague may not know that fact, but that is a fact. So I would suggest that, if he is concerned about reliance upon outyear cuts, I think he ought to look in the mirror because the budget that he supported has deeper cuts in the seventh year than the President has.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Speaker, the previous speaker just gave a wonderful speech on the reasons to have debt reduction and deficit reduction. The problem is that has nothing whatsoever to do with this bill and nothing whatsoever to do with the budget that the gentleman voted for. If the gentleman will check the numbers, he can talk about bringing interests rates down all he wants, but the budget that he is trying to foist onto the American people ha a deficit which goes up next year. It does not go down. If he can explain to me how interest rates are going to go down as the deficit goes up, he is a whole lot smarter than Alan Greenspan.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 8 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I would hope that we can cut through the bull gravy and focus on what is really happening here today. The fact is that this proposal really represents the majority party's determination to keep Government running on the installment plan. They do not have enough gas in the tank to get the car down the road apiece, so what they are doing is driving the Government about a block and then they have to get renewed authority and fill up the gas tank to get the Government to go down another block. That is no way to drive a car, it is no way to run a railroad, it is certainly no way to run a government. What you really are doing, by extending the ability to operate on a week-to-week basis, is you are playing weekly Russian roulette with local school districts, with veterans, with recipients of government assistance and a wide variety of programs. It is an immature way to run a government, and it ought to stop. This is the 12th time, the 12th time, that we have now had a temporary continuing resolution before us. In 2 weeks we will be one- half of the way through the fiscal year, and yet 70 percent of the domestic appropriations will still not be in law. Now, why is that? It is because the majority in this House insisted on passing through this House an extreme ideological agenda under which you slashed funding for education by 15 percent, you slashed job training by 18 percent, you slashed environmental cleanup enforcement by one-third. You attached a laundry list of special interest legislative riders to these appropriations bills, and to protect the public interest the President vetoed a number of the bills. The Education and Labor proposal was so extreme that the Republican- dominated Senate added more than $3 billion to at least partially restore the draconian cuts that you made in education, in manpower training, in summer jobs, and the like. Because of the extreme nature of that bill, we have not even yet been able to get to conference. The chairman just says ``Why don't you let the committee do its work and go to conference?'' Why does the committee not bring up the motion to appoint conferees? You cannot even have a conference until conferees are first appointed. The last time I looked, there is a dispute between the majority leader and the Speaker about process on the floor, so we cannot even officially get to conference because of yet another internal division within the Republican Party leadership in this House. Meanwhile, what is happening? What is happening is because they cannot get the decisions made, they are saying ``OK, let us run the Government on a reduced funding basis a week at a time.'' So they are funding education at a low level, which is going to require the layoff of a good many teachers and teachers' aides. They are preventing us from continuing to clean up all of the Superfund sites that we ought to be cleaning up, and then what do they do? They gin up a smokescreen. And the gentleman says, ``well,'' he justifies the cuts in drug free schools by pointing out something that some idiotic administrator did at the local level in a city or two to justify cutting back by a huge amount in that entire program. I would like to take just a minute to run through some of the arguments the gentleman is making. He argues, for instance, about what has happened to drug free schools. Let me say to the chairman of the committee, I will have unanimous-consent requests at the proper time to remove funding for virtually any of these items that you name. If you do not like the fact, for instance, as the gentleman indicated, that we had cosmetology schools being funded under the Student Aid Program, fine. I will ask unanimous consent to strike all funding for cosmetology schools. You mentioned last week you did not like the fact that there were massage schools being funded. I will have the unanimous-consent request to eliminate all funding for massage schools. I hope the gentleman will support that unanimous-consent request. I will have a number of other unanimous-consent requests.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Colorado [Mrs. Schroeder].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. I simply note that earlier in the year we were told, ``Let's just pass a 45-day continuing resolution. That will give us enough time to work out the long-term budget problems.'' That expired. Then they brought to the floor another continuing resolution. Then last week they brought to the floor another one, saying, ``Let's pass one to keeping the Government going for a week. That will be enough time to work out our problems.'' Now they are here saying the same thing they said the previous week, ``Just give us another week. We will work out the problems.'' Meanwhile, I still see no indication that the gentlemen on that side of the aisle are willing to back away from the environmental riders that are holding us up on the Interior bill. I see no indication that they are willing to restore the funding the President has asked so that we do not have to lay off 40,000 teachers. The problem is that every week that they continue with this ``government on the installment plan'' they push local school districts further and further to the point where they have to lay off teachers. We do not want that done. We want them to get down to the business now, deal with the regular long-term CR rather than continuing this ``let's pretend'' extension of the Government under which you are continuously week by week squeezing the guts out of education and squeezing the guts out of our ability to enforce the law when it comes to environmental cleanup. That is the problem we face here today. And we believe sincerely that the way that you are running this House is going to greatly increase and enhance the likelihood that, in fact, they are going to either have to come up with another CR next week or else they are going to have to shut the Government down next week. I mean every week it is the same thing. When are we going to get serious and simply resolve the differences on the long-term resolution. Otherwise they are using that as an opportunity to gouge every local school district in the country. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Montana [Mr. Williams].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, we have a simple choice here today. We can continue to pass 1-week continuing resolutions, which will force our school districts within the next 3 or 4 weeks to begin laying off 40,000 teachers; we can continue in place the policy of the majority party that will make it much more difficult for 1 million kids to learn how to read and how to deal with math; we can continue the process of cutting deeply into the school-to-work program, which largely enables kids who are not planning to go to college to get some help in transitioning from high schools to the world of work; we can continue to cripple the ability of the Government to protect the public interest from environmental damage by continuing the very large reductions in environmental cleanup that we have in the bill; or we can decide that we have had enough of that, and we are going to ask that those funds be restored. This issue is not about how much will be spent, because the President has offered offsets to every single dollar he wants to put back in this budget for education and for environment. The majority party simply made a decision that they want to buy twice as many B-2 bombers as the Pentagon asked for, and then they want to pay for it by taking it out of education and out of worker training and out of environmental cleanup. We think those are dumb priorities. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman can talk all he wants. He invents this fictitious list of about 760 Federal programs that are supposedly for education. If the gentleman wants to take out air traffic controller training, he is the chairman of the committee. Why does he not do it? He is not a helpless victim. If he wants to eliminate NIH kidney research, which they ludicrously count as an education program, if he wants to eliminate NIH heart research, which he ludicrously counts as an education program, if he wants to eliminate FBI advanced police training, go ahead, offer the motion. He is the chairman of the committee. He has the power to do so. We do not think it is a good idea to eliminate those things. The President's budget recommends the consolidation or elimination of 70 education programs so we can focus our money where it is needed most in the education area. Yet, we get this smokescreen pointing to some little silly action here or there at the local level to justify the fact that they are trying to impose on this country the largest reduction in support for education in the history of the country. We do not think that is a good way to help middle-class families raise their living standards and help give their kids decent jobs. We do not think it is a good idea to raise the cost of getting student loans by $10 billion over the next 7 years. We think we ought to get about the business of keeping the Government open full time, rather than this week-to-week nonsense. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to end the nonsense and vote against this silly piece of legislation.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from West Virginia [Mr. Wise].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Hoyer].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, in light of the express concern of the chairman of the committee about retreats or administrative personnel, student vacations, cosmetology schools, et cetera, I offer an amendment, and I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding the operation of the previous question on this amendment, that I be permitted to offer the amendment at this point, which would read as follows: At the end of the joint resolution, add the following new section: Sec. 101. Notwithstanding any other provision of law-- (a) none of the funds made available under this Act for the Safe and Drug Free Schools Program and the Title 1 Compensatory Education Program for Disadvantaged Students shall be used to pay the costs of disc jockeys, aerobics classes, retreats for administrative personnel, and student vacations; and (b) none of the funds made available under this Act may be used to administer any program subsidizing massage therapy and cosmetology schools.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.