Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, over the last 21 years I came to have a tremendous amount of professional respect and personal affection for Yitzhak Rabin. I remember after Camp David having a conversation with Anwar Sadat, and I asked him whether or not Camp David in his view represented a separate peace between Egypt and Israel or whether it would represent the first step in a comprehensive settlement. He said to me, ``Well, it had better be the latter because, if it isn't, I'll be dead within 5 years,'' and he was. Mr. Speaker, the last time I talked to Yitzhak Rabin he told me that without peace there was no real security for Israel, and he expressed his frustrations that his political opponents were lobbying this Congress to get in the way of the Israeli Government's efforts to move the peace process forward. Two days ago in Israel, at Mr. Rabin's funeral, a key member of the Knesset said to me, ``We have our necks out a mile. Is it too much to ask that Congress stay out of the way?'' He said, ``You must understand we have to help the Palestinians to make their elections work so that we have something real to build on.'' Rabin and Peres in Israel, Sadat of Egypt, John Hume of Northern Ireland, they and people like them risk their lives and their careers routinely to bring the security of peace to their people. The best tribute to Yitzhak Rabin on this floor will not be our words. It will be our actions in either furtherance of or in obstruction of the cause which he gave his life for and risked his life for on almost a daily basis. Mr. Speaker, I will miss Mr. Rabin both professionally and personally. He was one of the most dedicated and determined, and yet calm, men I have ever had the privilege to know in my life. I think he will truly go down as one of the great men who all of us have had the privilege to know.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, what this motion tries to do is to simply recognize we have a serious problem on our hands. It recognizes that the Congress has been unable to finish 89 percent of its appropriations work, and so what it attempts to do is to simply continue funding for the Government for another 30 days without any extraneous legislative riders whatsoever. It attempts not to raise new arguments or open new wounds so that we have a chance of getting the Senate to pass the same language that is passed by the House and, therefore, so that we have a chance to send something to the President which he will sign. Mr. Speaker, it is our view simply that by adding the language of the Istook amendment, which has already tied down one bill for over 50 days, that we go in the opposite direction of the direction that we have to proceed in if we want to solve this immediate problem. We certainly do not believe that this is an appropriate vehicle to begin the process by which we double or virtually double Medicare premiums, and so that item is also stripped out of the motion to recommit. This is an effort to bridge differences rather than create new ones. It simply continues the same language that the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Livingston] and the majority party brought to this House about 5 weeks ago. This is what we ought to do if we want to avoid innocent people being hurt with the Government shut down, and I would urge Members to adopt it. Mr.. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 8 minutes. Mr. Speaker, about 5 weeks ago when we had neared the end of the fiscal year, the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Livingston] and I brought to the House a bipartisan proposal which had been worked out with the leadership of both parties in both houses, as well as the White House, which extended the business of the Government so that the Congress could complete its work. That was made necessary because, for the first hundred days of this session, the majority party proceeded with its so-called contract, and that meant that, in contrast to the previous year when we had finished all 13 of our appropriation bills before the end of the fiscal year, the Congress was left with an immense amount of work yet to be done, and we worked out a bipartisan way to keep the Government going so that innocent people would not be hurt. Now we are in need of a new extension, and the majority is proposing that we extend this conference report to the December 1. I think this is a big mistake, because this resolution, instead of building bridges and trying to overcome differences, it exacerbates the differences, it widens them and it puts everyone further apart, because it is a much more confrontational document. it is as though it were designed to fail. It provides a 30-percent clobbering of programs such as low-income heating assistance, veterans benefits, some education items. It contains the controversial Istook language which would tie up every major charity in the country in red tape. It appears designed to ratchet up pressure on the President, because people are unhappy that the President has not signed bills which have not yet been sent to him. We are now 11 percent into the fiscal year, and we have exactly 11 percent of this year's fiscal budget passed. We have two bills here, military construction and agriculture, which have crossed the finish line, represented by this red line, and they have been signed into law. Two others have crossed the legislative finish line. They are awaiting the President's signature at the White House, and it is my understanding they are going to be signed. The leaves us with nine remaining horses that have yet to cross the finish line in the appropriations process. Now, those are not lagging behind because the President would not sign the bills. They are lagging behind because the Congress did not get its work done. For instance, we have the Treasury-Post Office bill here, hung up by the same Istook language which is being placed in the continuing resolution. It is the Republican majority in the Senate which is refusing to accept the Republican majority language in the House on the Istook amendment. It is not the President. The Interior Department, that appropriation bill is stuck in the Congress because we still do not have agreement between the two houses on extraneous legislative language that has nothing whatsoever to do with dollars in the bill. The foreign operations bill went through both houses of Congress, but it is hung up because there is a difference between the Republicans in the House and the Republicans in the Senate on the issue of abortion and the Mexico City language. The VA-HUD and Commerce conferences have yet to meet. The Defense conference has not met in some 3 weeks since its original product was voted down on the floor of this House. The President did not beat that bill. This House did. The Labor-HEW appropriation bill, passed by the House, was so extreme that the Republican-controlled Senate will not even take the bill up. So that is why 89 percent of our appropriations work is still not completed, far short of the finish line. Yet, instead of trying to recognize that this is a congressional failure, instead we have an effort to ratchet up the heat on the President because people are frustrated by the fact that the Congress itself has not been able to do its work. That makes no sense whatsoever. In addition, we have another problem. This continuing resolution would extend the Government's ability to function for the remainder of November, down to December 1. It will have taken us from November 6 through about November 13 to get this done. Now, you would think this would give us enough time to get our work done. But there is a little problem. That little problem is that Congress is scheduled to be out during these days, so the congressional recess cuts a huge hole in the extension provided under the continuing resolution. There will be only 6 days in which the Congress can complete action on nine of the appropriation bills, if you take the 3 days before we go out next week and the 3 days afterward. Does anybody really believe that the majority party is going to make enough progress in resolving the fights within their own caucus to complete action on these appropriation bills during that period of time? I do not know anyone that really believes that is going to happen. So, we are going to be forced to be back here with yet another resolution. That makes no sense. We ought to be able to focus our energies on passing the appropriation bills that have not yet passed, rather than having to work 5 or 6 days to simply pass another continuing resolution because this one is so short it does not really mean anything. I would simply suggest that we do not have to raise Medicare premiums in order to deal with this problem. You do not have to add the inflammatory Istook language, which we know the Republican majority in the Senate will not swallow. You do not need to widen the differences between people in this building. We ought to be trying to bridge those differences and close those gaps in opinions. We ought to be trying to sit down and work out another simple extension. That is why in my motion to recommit I will offer that. I will offer a simple 1-month extension without any additional bells and whistles, without any ideological gimmicks, just a simple, straight, neutral extension for 1 month so that we do have a realistic timeframe during which the majority party can resolve its intra-party differences, and we can also, in the process, send more of these bills down to the President so that we have a chance of closing out the appropriations cycle before we deal with the reconciliation matter, which is still likely to tie up the Government for a good long time. I urge you to accept that recommit motion and not to go down this road.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Speaker, I hope we do not fall for the smokescreen which suggests that we have to pass this continuing resolution in order to take care of the breast cancer problems and the prostate cancer problems cited in the debate today. In my view, those are simply here in order to cover the tracks of people who are intending at the same moment to raise Medicare premiums by $9 or more a month. If you want to deal with the prostate cancer and breast cancer problems that are dealt with in the continuing resolution, it is very simple. You can put this bill, which I will introduce today, on the suspension calendar. You can pass it in 20 minutes and send it to the other body, and you can resolve those problems without going this charade, which in my view is designed to cover the fact that those who vote for this resolution today are really simply trying to raise Medicare premiums by $9 or more per month. I invite anyone in the House who would like to cosponsor this measure with me to put their names on the bill before I introduce it this afternoon. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Ms. DeLauro].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining on both sides?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California [Ms. Pelosi].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Connecticut [Mr. Gejdenson].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Fattah].

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Speaker, we have had a lot of side debates on a lot of issues that do not belong here today, but the main question facing us today is whether or not we are going to be able to pass a new continuing resolution which keeps the Government going because the majority party in this Congress has been unable to pass 89 percent of the appropriated portion of the budget. They do not make that more likely by putting extraneous legislation in this proposal, which they know will be vetoed, which puts us on the path to virtually doubling Medicare premiums. What they are trying to do is to use this device to get this House to again endorse the majority party decision to virtually double Medicare premiums. We are not going to do that and neither is the President of the United States. Second, they do not make it easier to pass a continuing resolution when they add the Istook redtape amendment to it, which would tie up virtually every charity in this country in massive redtape, language which has already tied up one appropriation bill for 51 days. That is not the way you solve an immediate crisis. Now, the Istook amendment is masqueraded by its sponsor as being aimed at lobbyists. Baloney. What the Istook amendment would say to the Farmers Union, who we have asked to run the National Green Thumb senior jobs program so that we do not have to build up a bureaucracy in the Federal Government, what that would say to the Farmers Union is, ``Because you are performing that service to the taxpayers, you cannot open your mouth to comment on what you think farm policy ought to be.'' It also says to the National Council of Senior Citizens, who are being asked to run the senior aides program so we do not have to establish another Federal bureaucracy, they are being told: ``Sorry, if you are going to perform that public service, then you cannot lobby and tell the Congress how you feel about Medicare.'' That is authoritarian and it is wrong and that is why the President opposes it and why we oppose it. What we ought to be doing is very simply meeting the task before us, which is to find some way to bridge the differences between the Senate and the House and pass an extension of the budget so that we can continue to have some time to do our work. That is what we ought to do. Instead we are being asked to add a bunch of ideological bells and whistles which are most assuredly going to bring this package down. They know the Senate will not accept the Istook amendment. Their own party will not accept the Istook amendment. And they know that the President will not accept doubling the Medicare premium. This is not an effort to solve a problem; this is an effort to exacerbate it. We ought to reverse course before it is too late and it hurts innocent people.

Mr. OBEY

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. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 1, rule I, I demand a vote on agreeing to the Speaker's approval of the Journal.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I demand the gentleman's words be taken down. The gentleman's words go to the motives of the sponsor of this amendment. They are outrageous. They ought to be withdrawn.

Mr. OBEY. I will not object if the gentleman understands that I raised the objection because what he essentially said is that the sponsors of the amendment were not interested in a clean environment, they were interested in spreading misleading words on the floor of the House. That is my objection. If he is willing to withdraw that, I have no objection to their being withdrawn.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, 1 month into the fiscal year, only 8 percent of the appropriations in the budget are done for the fiscal year. At that rate, it will take an entire year to finish 100 percent of the appropriation items. Eighty-five percent of the appropriated dollars in the budget, in defense, in labor, HEW, in the EPA appropriation bill, are all tied up in very large measure because of extraneous legislative language added to what is supposed to be budget bills. In this bill before us today, these 17 riders would, among other things, exempt oil refineries from air toxic standards under the Clean Air Act. They would allow 1 million tons of hazardous waste from cement kilns to be exempted from air toxic requirements. They would stop enforcement of the law with respect to the dumping of raw sewage into our rivers. They would stop enforcement of the arsenic standards. These 17 rules, in my view, are a lobbyist's dream, and I would simply suggest that the idea that we ought to try to consider each of them separately on an appropriation bill, simply the effect of that gives lobbyists 17 different opportunities to pick off enough people on this floor to win 1 or 2 or 3 of those items, because of special sectional pressures. In my view, these do not belong in a budget bill. We ought to deal with budget issues clean. I want to say one other item, or I want to make one other point. I want to say to my Republican friends on this side of the aisle, we have not made a single bit of environmental progress through the years without bipartisan cooperation because the two parties. Do not let that cooperation stop now. Do not walk away from the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party jointly have fine bipartisan traditions of moving environmental protections forward. Let us keep those traditions moving forward today by supporting the Stokes motion.

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, earlier this year the Republican majority approved cuts of $3.5 billion from discretionary education programs, including over a billion dollars in title I. The District of Columbia will share in those reductions. The harmful effect of those cuts will far outweigh any benefit, potentially, that may accrue to the District under the Gunderson amendment. Mr. Chairman, my fundamental objection is that this amendment should not be here on this bill in the first place. We are 1 month into the beginning of the fiscal year. Ninety-two percent of the Federal budget is still being held up on the appropriated side of the budget. Mr. Chairman, it is because amendments like this are being attached. This is a legislative issue. It ought to be dealt with by the legislative committee. It is a 144-page add-on which our committee has had absolutely no hearings on and which we should not be passing on here today. Mr. Chairman, I know that most Members will vote for or against the amendment. I am profoundly opposed to this amendment. Not only because it should not be on the appropriation bill, but also because I think it has profound national implications as well. But even if I am the only one, as I was yesterday, I am going to vote ``present'' when the vote comes on this bill to simply indicate my objection to the constant practice of bringing legislative items to this bill that should not be here. Mr. Chairman, I was not elected to be a city councilman for the District of Columbia. I was not elected by District residents in order to decide what their education rules are going to be. If they do not like what the Congress does here today, they cannot vote against us. That breaks the principle of accountability. It indeed means taxation without representation. It means the establishment of policy without representation. That, in my view, means that this amendment constitutes an illegitimate legislative act. That is why I am going to vote ``present'' on these and all other legislative items, because we have no business in this forum, in this committee, voting on this issue. If the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling] likes the idea, then, fine, do your duty and bring it out of your committee. That is the committee of jurisdiction.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, this is an appropriations bill, and being an appropriations bill we are supposed to be dealing with financial issues. I do not like the fact that we have to interpose ourselves when it comes to the financial decisions of the District, that we have to interpose ourselves in their affairs, but we have no choice because the District Government has proven itself to be incapable of managing its financial affairs. Because that lack of capability has a spillover effect on taxpayers around the country, I think we have no choice but to reenter the fray. Having said that, I would observe, however, that I do not honestly believe, given the nature of the District and given the nature of the surrounding territory, the suburbs, I do not believe that the District will ever truly be financially viable unless there is exhibited a great deal, or a great--well, I will make somebody mad if I put it that way. Let me simply say that I think persons who reside in suburbs need to recognize their financial responsibilities to the District that they use to a much greater degree than they do right now if the District is ever to be financially viable. That will probably make some people mad, too. Having said that, Mr. Chairman, I want to deal with what I consider to be a very serious overreaching on the part of the Congress here this afternoon. It is one thing for us to make financial decisions affecting the District because we have no financial choice. It is quite another for us to become the city council for the District of Columbia on nonfinancial affairs and start changing D.C. law on a variety of subjects just because we do not like what D.C. law happens to be at this moment. Example. We are being asked to make major changes in D.C. law with respect to their education system. We are being asked to make major changes in D.C. law with respect to adoption. We are being asked to single out the NEA for the loss of a tax exemption, when there are many other organizations who are also exempt from paying property taxes in the District. Mr. Chairman, I believe that when the Congress crosses the line and gets involved in these legislative issues it does so illegitimately for one very simple reason: Because the persons who live in the District of Columbia cannot retaliate against the elected officials who make those decisions. They have no ability to vote us in or out, unlike out constituents. And when we start making legislative decisions that affect their lives and they do not have any redress, our forefathers called that taxation without representation. So I think that when we get into these other legislative areas, we are engaging in an illegitimate legislative act, and that is why, when they come to the floor, if they do not relate strictly to the financial problems that the District has, I will not vote for them or against them. I will simply cast a vote ``present'' in order to, in some small way, to protest the fact that this House is being asked to act as a mini city council and I do not think our taxpayers back home expect us to do that. Mr. Chairman, we screw up enough of what we touch at the national level without wasting time screwing things up in the District of Columbia as well, to be blunt about it. I think that it is the height of arrogance for Members to use their power simply because in this instance we have the political ability to engage in these actions. I would simply observe in closing that while I do not know what the proper level of the Federal payment to the District ought to be, I think the committee has a right to make a judgment on that. But when we start telling the District how it must change its law on nonfinancial items, I think we are abusing the power we have been given by our own constituents and I think we ought not to do it.

Mr. OBEY. I would appreciate it if the gentleman would not mention my name if he is not going to yield to me.

Mr. OBEY

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. Evidently a quorum is not present.

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