Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, at the direction of the minority leader, I offer a motion to recommit.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I most respectfully and reluctantly appeal the ruling of the Chair.

Mr. OBEY. Yes, I do, Mr. Speaker, I would simply say the purpose of the resolution before us this evening is to provide additional services to taxpayers. The purpose of my motion is to provide additional services to taxpayers. It simply expands the number of services available. It is the same taxpayers we are talking about, and I think they are entitled to a full range of services. I would therefore urge the Chair support the germaneness of the proposition.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I think the purpose of this motion is quite clear. As I said earlier, this motion would incorporate the provisions of the Veterans Department which are included in the original legislation before us. We would open up the Government for those services, but we would add to that the following: We would add all remaining services to be provided by the Veterans Department.

Mr. OBEY. No. 1.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that I may be permitted to explain the amendment.

Mr. OBEY. In its present form, yes, I am, Mr. Speaker.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this amendment is very simple. The proposition now before the House allows the Veterans Department to open for the purpose of payments of existing veterans' benefits and to provide payments to contractors of the Veterans Health Administration of the Department of Veterans Affairs when due in the case of services, provided that those services directly relate to patient health and safety. All we would do is add the following language. We would add language saying that the Veterans Department would also be open for all other authorized activities of the Department of Veterans Affairs, including the processing of existing and new applications for benefits and pensions, processing of certificates of eligibility for home ownership loans and loan guarantees, and payment of salaries of Federal Government personnel providing health care for our Nation's veterans. And that they would be continued at a rate for operations not to exceed the rate in existence on December 15, 1995. That is all it does. It simply says if you are going to open up the Veterans Department, open it up to everyone. I would urge the Members of the majority, in the interest of comity, in the interest of rationality, to accept this amendment. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. I do, Mr. Speaker. Mr. SPEAKER pro tempore. The Clerk will report the motion to recommit.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, at the direction of the minority leader, I offer a third motion to recommit.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would simply say that the purpose of this resolution tonight is to open certain functions of the veterans Department so that the public can receive the benefit of the services from that department. We are simply saying that since it has already been announced that government workers will be paid afterwards, whether they work or not, that we think they ought to be allowed to work, and I will leave the ruling in the hands of the Chair.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I simply take this time to explain for the Record why I have cast the only vote against the proposition the House just voted on. I did not vote no because I was opposed to the proposition; as I said during debate, no one was opposed to the proposition. But House rules dictate if I were to be in a position to offer a motion to recommit that I needed to vote ``no'' on final passage. I did so because I felt strongly that we should not only open the government for the services provided in the resolution, but should also open the Government for the purpose of other services that could be provided by the veterans department, and all other government employees as well. The motion that I offered included all of the language of the original resolution, plus the additional language that would have opened up other functions of the veterans department, providing those services as well, and opened up all other agencies of the government which remained closed. So for procedural reasons, to protect my right to offer that language which included all of the language provided in the original resolution, I was required by the House rules to vote ``no.''.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I hope that no one here thinks that anything real is going on, because it is not and that is a disgrace. It is a downright shame. Mr. Speaker, as everyone knows, the President and the Republican leadership in the Congress have a ``slightly'' different view about what budget priorities ought to be, about what tax priorities ought to be, and they have reached an impasse, apparently. So, to try to gain more brownie points politically, what is now happening is that the Republican leadership of the House is bringing a bill to the floor which they pretend is the President's budget. Mr. Speaker, it is not the President's budget. It is their own concoction, their own political concoction designed to create another vehicle by which they can rhetorically beat up on the President for a couple of hours, rather than sitting down seriously and talking about real program differences on budget negotiations. Mr. Speaker, they also are planning later today, apparently, at least they have been, to bring up a continuing resolution to allow the Government of the District of Columbia to proceed, but not to allow the Federal Government to reopen. I also find that position ludicrous and unreal. What we need to have happen here is for the political rhetoric to stop. What we need to have happen is for the Republican leadership of the Congress to sit down and negotiate with the President with no preconditions. What we need is for all of us to stop attacking each other rhetorically because we are not about to do anything real. Mr. Speaker, we ought to be doing something that is real. What we ought to be doing is to try to find ways to bridge differences, not to find rhetorical arguments that will expand those differences. Why should we have a closed rule on this budget to allow only this so- called President's budget to come up, when it is not even the President's budget? He is not even asking that you do it. Why should the coalition budget not be up? Why should a number of other options not be up on the floor? All this is is a narrow political exercise that substitutes rhetoric for real action. What has happened in plain view is that the majority party has taken so much heat in the polls for their budgets which have squashed Medicare, squashed Medicaid, squashed education, that they are trying to divert attention from that. To do that, first of all they engineer an unneeded Government shutdown, an artificially created crisis, and then they bring this joke to the floor. They should be ashamed of themselves. We have better things to do with our time than this dog and pony act.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I understand that, Mr. Speaker, but he will have 15 and we will have 15?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Durbin].

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado [Mr. Skaggs].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 6 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I think we ought to make very clear what is happening here tonight. Last week the Congress adjourned without passing the continuing resolution that would have kept the Government open, and if you took a look at what happened around this town over the weekend, you saw that both the Republicans and the Democrats in the Senate stayed in town and talked with each other about the budget. You saw the House Democrats stay in town and in fact we were in meetings for some 11 hours over the weekend, trying to find ways that we can help resolve the problem. However, my understanding is that our good friends on the Republican side of the aisle in the House were told they could leave town: There would be no votes until late Monday. That is fact No. 1. Fact No. 2 is that because there is no continuing resolution now in effect, you do have significant portions of the Government shut down. Now, what is going on is that evidently the Republican message team in their caucus has decided that there ought to be 15 minutes or half an hour debate on this bill on the next bill so that people can play pin the tail on the President in terms of having another cat-and-dog fight about who is to blame for the shutdown of Government. That is what is going on. So we have an artificial debate here that we do not even need to have. Under normal processes, this bill would simply be referred to the committee with no debate and no vote, unless the majority party decided they wanted to try to override the veto. So what is going on here is another one of those little debates that further, I think, discredits the Congress in the eyes of the American people; and I think that is regrettable, but since we are here, I have no choice but to try to expose what is going on. Now, what is happening, and what you will hear for the next 20 minutes is, our Republican friends will be trying to tell the country, through the TV cameras focused here on this floor, that somehow the President is to blame for the shutdown of Government, even though the reason the Government is shut down is because they would not allow a continuing resolution to come to the floor to keep it open. So they are trying to shift attention from their lack of performance on the CR to this bill. The President had every right to veto this bill. He told the Congress ahead of time if they sent it to him in this form, he would veto the bill. He gave them forewarning of that. In his veto message he points out that, among other things, his reason for doing so is because what this bill does for clear-cutting in the Tongass. That is an important policy issue. We do not just serve as accountants in the Congress, believe it or not. We and the President also have to make an occasional decision, believe it or not, on policy; and the President chose to stand on principle and veto this bill for, among other reasons, because of what it does to clear-cutting in the Tongass. I am not going to debate that here tonight because there is no reason for us to debate that. What we should be doing tonight, rather than having a meaningless half-hour debate on this vote, is simply passing a continuing resolution so that people who work for the Government for a living can do their jobs. That is what we should be doing. But instead, we will get this sham debate which substitutes a motion for movement. It is not going to do anybody any good. I would simply make one additional point. The reason we are stuck here tonight is because the policy arguments that are going to be worked out after the President's veto should have been worked out 4 months ago. However, because the majority party felt that they had to first pass their contract items, and then because they chose to load up the Interior bill and the HUD bill with a bunch of extraneous measures that had no business in an appropriation bill, we spent the last 4 months in a debate between Republicans in the House and Republicans in the Senate on a lot of these policy matters. The Interior bill was brought down a number of times because people on both sides of the aisle said that it was not the right bill to present to the President. All I will say tonight, and I would prefer that we not be saying anything at all, because as I said, this is a meaningless debate on a bill that is going nowhere except to committee. What ought to happen tonight is that instead of having this meaninglessss ``who shot John'' debate, we should simply have a motion on this floor to pass a continuing resolution to keep the Government open while these differences between the President and the Congress are resolved. That is the rational thing to do. It is the nonpolitical thing to do. But evidently we are not going to do it. About the only other thing I can see that would make any sense in the Christmas season is at this point to take up a collection in the House so that we could buy a toy train for the folks who are running the House these days, because they certainly cannot run a real one.

Mr. OBEY. So is the gentleman asking unanimous consent to yield back half the time?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I did not understand the motion of the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Regula]. Is the gentleman trying to yield back half of the debate time?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the remainder of my time. Mr. Speaker, I have known the gentleman from Ohio a good long time and the gentleman from California a good long time, and they are both fine legislators and they are both tough adversaries. I know that especially on the bill which will come up next that we have had some very tough issues and some very heated words exchanged on the floor and in committee between various Members in the House. Having said that, I know full well that if these bills had been left to the judgment of the gentleman from Ohio and the gentleman from California without extraneous political pressures intervening, that both of them would probably by now have become law, and I think that both bills would have been in better shape by far than the bills which the President was forced to veto. None of us can do anything about the circumstances in which these bills are being debated. But I do simply want to take this time to say that after we discuss all of these bills tonight, after we discuss this bill and the VA-HUD bill which is coming next, and the vetoes of both of them, there is remaining one action which we could take which would do something real to open the Government tonight. That would simply be to pass House Joint Resolution 131, which is at the desk, which is introduced by the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Gephardt], myself, and the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Murtha], which would simply keep the Government open from now until January 26, so that we could, in fact, resolve the many differences which remain between the White House and the Congress on these bills and many others. As you know, the majority leader in the Senate even indicated at one point his preference for a longer continuing resolution than that. I happen to think he was right when he said that. What we have now is the miserable spectacle of a series of 2- and 3- day CR's, intermittent Government shutdowns, all for the purpose apparently of the leadership of the this House gaining some leverage in the other discussions going on over the budget. I think that is illegitimate. The reason the Government is shut down has nothing whatsoever to do with the budget discussions about 7-year budget figures going on in other places in this building. The reason the Government is shut down is simply because the appropriation bills did not work their way through Congress in a timely fashion and, when they did, they were burdened with special-interest provisions which required the President to veto them, and in several cases were burdened with reductions so savage that, in fact, in the other body they would not even take them up. So I would simply say that despite all of the hyperbole we will hear tonight, if we want to do something constructive for the people we represent after that debate is finished, we will see something similar to House Joint Resolution 131 brought out so that Government can stay open while we resolve our differences. That is the rational thing to do.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would urge the Chair and the majority leadership to do that.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Appropriations be discharged from further consideration of the joint resolution (H.J. Res. 131), a clean CR to extend the existing CR to January 26, to authorize the 2.4 percent military pay raise to be effective January 1, and to eliminate the 6-month disparity between COLA payment dates for military and civilian retirees in fiscal 1996, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I have said on more than one occasion that the worst mistakes one can make in this town is to believe one's own baloney. I hope that the two friends of mine who just spoke do not believe their own baloney because it is baloney. The fact is the President made very clear that he would oppose this bill because it did not meet his standards in terms of a balance in funding, and it also did not meet his standards in terms of keeping special interest provisions off the bill. The President made clear that he was not going to accept a 22-percent reduction in funding for environmental protection and he made very clear that what he wanted was a different allocation between the subcommittees so that we can, in fact, fulfill the commitment that all of us signed on to when we supported the last continuing resolution. Despite all of the talk today by Members of the majority party about a balanced budget in 7 years, that talk reminds me of Ronald Reagan in the old movie ``King's Row.'' After Reagan woke up in the hospital, his legs had been amputated, and he said, where is the rest of me? My question is where is the rest of my colleagues? They are talking about the need for a balanced budget in 7 years, but they are forgetting that the other half of the deal was that Congress would agree that that balanced budget must protect future generations, it must ensure Medicare solvency, reform welfare and provide adequate funding for Medicaid, education, agriculture, national defense, veterans and the environment. I do not know which dictionary my colleagues use most of the time, but I would doubt that anybody's dictionary would allow one to conclude that we have adequately protected the environment by cutting back by 22 percent the funding that we are providing in this bill for environmental protection. Now, Members can say all they want about veterans health care, but the fact is that veterans health care is funded at a level $213 million below the amount in the original House bill, and that House bill was brought to us by the Republican majority; and yet they had $1,500,000,000 more to deal with in the conference than they had in the original House bill. It just seems to me that on its face those numbers demonstrate that the majority party is not meeting the commitment it signed on to when it passed the continuing resolution. That is why the President is vetoing the bill and that is why he should have vetoed the bill.