Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I think the gentleman would have to admit that we would be in a position to offer it if no Member on his side of the aisle raised a parliamentary objection.

Mr. OBEY. Would the gentleman mind answering my question?

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I will not take much time. I would simply try to reinforce what the gentleman from North Carolina has just said. We have heard several speakers take the floor on the Republican side of the aisle this morning and denounce business as usual. Then we hear others come to the floor and say, ``Well, it is all right to do this stuff on a continuing resolution because it was done in the past.'' I thought you folks were bragging about the fact that you had been elected to change business as usual. There is a very big difference between the action that was taken on the continuing resolution that ended the Vietnam war, and I was here and I voted for it and I helped draft it. I would note that the difference is that that resolution's passage saved lives, lots of them. This refusal today of this Congress to pass a continuing resolution is screwing up lives, and it is screwing up the country.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I was referring to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, that is not why I asked the gentleman to yield. I asked him to yield because I wanted to ask him why does his side not include the record last year?

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the majority leader for yielding. I would just like to ask, as you know, there is considerable discussion about a possible continuing resolution this evening. When might we get the language that the gentleman is talking about so that we have some opportunity to review it before we are asked to debate it?

Mr. OBEY. Is there any opportunity to get that language before we get up to the Committee on Rules, so we know what it is we are being asked to do in the Committee on Rules?

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Florida [Mrs. Meek]. (Mrs. MEEK of Florida asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I would say to the gentleman, he is smart enough to know history. Do not rewrite it. You and I both lived it.

Mr. OBEY. The Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats controlled the House and the White House.

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

Mr. OBEY. With a ``B'', a big B. It fits with the big baloney we are being told to slice here tonight. What we are being told is that we should buy into another multiyear promise, but I want to know what assumptions are behind that promise. How much are you planning to cut Social Security in order to get there in 7 years? How much are you planning to cut education, and how much will that squeeze educational opportunity for young people today? How much are you going to be providing in taxes to your rich friends? Do we really have to buy into those assumptions in order to get a balanced budget? I do not think so. I am perfectly willing to sign on, in a minute, to a balanced budget if you will remove your tax cuts, if you will provide the President with a line item veto that applies to tax gifts as well as appropriations, so that he has all of the goodies that he can eliminate in order to hold to that timetable. I am willing to do it if you have a civilized and fair distribution of burden on taxes and on education and all the rest. But I am not willing to buy into a 7-year timetable just on vague promises, buy into a 7-year promise with a blindfold on, simply based on your promise that you are going to get it right this time when you screwed it up three times before. I would suggest we ought to quit all of the fancy promises, we ought to quit all of the past history, now that I have corrected some of the misstatements that we have had all day here, and what we ought to ask ourselves is one simple question: whether we will do what is right tonight, whether we will do what is right tonight to create a better future for our kids tomorrow. That is the choice before us. Mr. Speaker, I urge the Speaker, get over your personal pique, get over your hurt feelings about an airplane trip, grow up, and do what this country expects, which is to meet the immediate needs of the country in the fairest way possible.

Mr. OBEY. ``Billion.''

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, we are here tonight, not because we do not have a 7-year commitment to a balanced budget and not because lots of other things have not happened. We are here tonight for one very simple reason, because this has not happened. This chart represents each of the 13 appropriation bills which are supposed to pass in order for the Congress to fulfill its obligations. We have only passed three. So, Mr. Speaker, we have over 90 percent of the Government represented by these 10 appropriations bills still not passed through the appropriations process. Most of those bills have been hung up because of the fights over extraneous issues such as the Interior bill that went down today because the majority party insists on continuing to reward Western mining interests with huge boondoggles. We have abortion tying up other bills. We have the Labor-HEW bill tied up simply because the Senate Republicans are so embarrassed by the extreme nature of the bill that passed the House that they would not even take it up. It is not the Democrats who will not take it up in the Senate, it is the Republicans. Mr. Speaker, I do not say that to point fingers. I say that simply to point out facts. This is our problem, not what is happening in some other committee on long-term budget problems. Our problem is that the Congress simply has not done its work. Mr. Speaker, first we were told earlier in the week that the way to solve this was to double Medicare fees, and so for 2 days our Republican friends said we are going to hold the Government hostage until we double Medicare fees. Well, they decided they were getting burned on that in the court of public opinion, so now they have found a way to try to shift the argument, and, no, I will not yield until I finish. I was shocked to see in the Associated Press an article which I think tells us why we are really here in what is the functional equivalent of an institutional temper tantrum, and I want to read this for my colleagues, Washington (AP), dateline today, Reporter Jill Lawrence: An angry Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Clinton administration snubs during lengthy flights to and from Yitzhak Rabin's funeral led to this week's budget impasse and government shutdown. House Speaker Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole have been simmering ever since their 25 hours in the air early this month. ``Both of us got on that airplane expecting to spend several hours talking about the budget and how do we avoid the shutdown,'' Gingrich said. ``Every president we had ever flown with had us up front. Every president we had ever flown with had talked to us at length.'' The lack of contact and their having to exit through the rear of the plane were ``part of why you ended up with us sending down a tougher continuing resolution,'' Gingrich said in an extraordinary exchange with reporters at a breakfast meeting. He then went on to admit ``This is petty. I'm going to say up front it's petty, and Tony,'' meaning Blankley, his press secretary, ``will probably say that I shouldn't say it, but I think it's human.'' Well, it may be human, but it is dead wrong, given the serious consequences facing this country. Who are we kidding when people say, as someone just did, that it was the President who precipitated this crisis? The Speaker was quoted on April 3 as saying the following: ``Gingrich boasted that the President will veto a number of things and will then put them all in the debt ceiling, and then he will decide how big a crisis he wants.'' That was said on April 3, not after the President vetoed the continuing resolution. So I really think what we are looking at here tonight is the functional equivalent of an institutional temper tantrum brought on by the hurt feelings of the Speaker of the House because of his airplane episode. I think he ought to come down to earth and think about what the consequences are going to be for people on the surface of this globe, and they are not very pretty. I also want to raise some basic questions about the wisdom of tying ourselves into a 7-year promise. If I thought that that 7-year promise would be kept, I would say by all means, let us make a promise right now to balance the budget in 7 years. But I want to point out, we have had a number of multiyear promises before. In 1981, we had a promise from the President, President Reagan, that if we just passed his budget, we would balance the budget in 4 years. After it was passed, the President's Secretary of the Treasury, Donald Regan, said, ``This is our program. It is now in place.'' This chart demonstrates the difference between the promise and the performance. They promised to take the deficit down from $55 billion down to a $1 billion surplus, does that sound familiar, in 4 years. They only missed by $185 billion. So then they produced Gramm-Rudman I. They said, ``Okay, we are going to make a 7-year promise. We are going to get to zero,'' from what was then a $172 billion deficit down to zero in 7 years. They passed it. They only missed by $220 billion, represented by these red bars here. Then they said, ``Okay, we are going to try it again, baby,'' so they passed Gramm-Rudman II. That was a 5-year promise to get us down from a $144 billion deficit down to zero by 1992. You know what? They only missed by $290 billion. So I would say, beware of those bearing multiyear promises.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, Members can make their debating points on any bill they want except this one. The fact is that there will be 20,000 people a day who will apply for Social Security assistance. That means about 40 in each congressional district. There will be about 3,000 veterans who will apply for help on any given day, about 6 in each district. Those may seem like small numbers, but they are not small to the people involved. We ought to get on with our business, stop the debating points. That is why I will, whenever I can today, offer a motion for a clean CR, whether it is 1 month or 1 day, whatever the powers that be in this House will allow, so that we do not wind up hurting innocent people while we continue to debate other issues that should be settled on other legislation in other places. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to support my request of the Speaker that he allow for a clean CR for whatever length of time that the Speaker would be happy to entertain. (Mr. LIVINGSTON asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Schumer]. (Mr. SCHUMER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maine [Mr. Baldacci].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Ms. DeLauro].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas [Mr. Stenholm]. (Mr. STENHOLM asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. If the gentleman would yield, that is what the gentleman from Illinois just said.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. It is not my purpose, and I am not going to get suckered into a personal exchange with the gentleman. All I can say is when the gentleman tells me, without benefit of microphone, that he meant to impugn the motives of the President of the United States, I think that that is the kind of conduct that deserves the attention of the House, and I make no apology whatsoever in making that comment public. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Durbin].