Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on House Joint Resolution 52.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Speaker, this resolution keeps government functioning until Congress and the President can make final decisions on appropriation issues for fiscal year 2008. It is a clean CR. It funds all departments at last year's level. The only exception is a $5.2 billion appropriation for MRAPs, which are essential to protect our troops. It expires November 16. I ask Members to do the responsible thing and vote ``aye.'' Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, let me recite a slightly different version of recent history with respect to appropriation bills. After 12 years of rule by the Republican Party, the American people gave the Democratic Party the privilege of moving into the majority in the last election. We were sworn in on January 4. At that point, not a single domestic appropriation bill had been passed by the previous Congress. So before we could move to our own business for this year, we had to first clean up the unfinished business left by the previous Republican- controlled Congress. That took us 6 weeks. And in 6 weeks we passed the entire domestic budget; and, at the time we did that, we eliminated all earmarks. Then we also set about to implement the earmark reform process which was spoken for by both political parties in this House. That took us an extra 3 weeks. During that time, we ramped up the number of hearings and the intensity of congressional oversight; and by the end of the hearing process we had doubled the number of hearings held by the previous Congress and restored a much more tenacious set of oversight habits. We also were forced to confront the President on Iraq because of the unraveling situation in that misbegotten war. And we also, as we tried to pass our appropriation bills, had to endure filibuster by amendment on the part of the minority. They took more than 60 hours above the amount taken by the minority in the previous year on appropriation bills. Republicans offered 339 amendments to the appropriation bills that we passed in the House, compared to 172 amendments that were offered by Democrats when we were in the minority. Despite all of that, we still managed to pass every single appropriation bill before the August recess. That is only the second time during the Bush administration that this House has passed all of its appropriation bills before the August recess. Then those bills went to the Senate; and, as the gentleman indicated, they ran into considerable trouble. The Senate has passed four bills. I have asked them to proceed to pass as many additional bills as they can, and I hope that they do. And, incidentally, when they do bring up bills, I was told yesterday that you have between two and three hundred amendments filed to several of the bills, so you face a filibuster by amendment on the part of the minority in the Senate. As you know, under Senate rules, debate cannot be shut down unless you have 60 votes, rather than 50. So that's the record as I see it. The gentleman from California has recited the record as he sees it. But I would suggest that what is important is what we do now. Where do we go from here? Even as the Senate makes an effort to complete action on its bills, I would hope that we could shorten the process by sitting down now with the administration to work out compromises on those bills so that we don't have to spend the next 6 weeks continuing to define our differences. I'm an old-fashioned legislator, and I believe that the way the parties ought to proceed is that we first ought to define our differences and then we ought to resolve them. We've already defined our differences with the passage of the 12 bills in the House. I doubt that the Senate bills are going to get any better from our standpoint, and so it seems to me that time's awasting. It seems to me that we would best serve the needs of the country if the administration would be willing to sit down with us now and begin discussions about how we might reach compromises on these bills so that we can move forward. Now, let me make one additional point. The President is asking us to spend about $200 billion, every dollar of that borrowed, in order to finance the supplemental for the war in Iraq, and yet he is objecting to the fact that in the House-passed bills we tried to take about 1/ 10th that amount and use it for crucial investments in our country's future. The job of this Congress, the job certainly of this committee, is to make investments that will benefit the country over the long haul, make us a stronger country, and make us a stronger society over the next 10 years. We don't believe on this side of the aisle, and I think in fact we had significant bipartisan agreement if you take a look at the votes, we don't believe that you accomplish that strengthening of the country by cutting vocational education by 50 percent, as the President does in his budget; by eliminating all student aid programs except work study and Pell Grant, as the President does in his budget; by gutting education technology grants, as the President does in his budget; by actually reducing the number of medical research grants at NIH, as the President does in his budget. I've never had anybody come up to me in my life and say, ``Obey, why don't you guys in Congress get your act together and cut cancer research.'' And yet, that's what the Congress has done the last 2 years. We don't think that ought to happen. So that's why we depart from the President on that score. We also don't think we strengthen the country when we cut special education by $300 million, and there are a good many Republicans who agree with that. In fact, Mr. Walsh, the ranking Republican on the Labor, Health, Education and Social Services Subcommittee, Mr. Walsh, led the effort to increase the funds that our committee provided for special education, and I commend him for it. We also don't think it's good to cut mental health and drug abuse funding by $160 million. We don't think that we strengthen the society or this country when we cut minority health professions training by 66 percent. We don't think that we improve health care for children by cutting the training of medical personnel in children's hospitals by 63 percent, and we don't think we strengthen rural America by cutting rural health programs by 54 percent. We don't think we help make our communities better and cleaner by cutting the clean water revolving fund by 37 percent, as the President does. We don't believe that we meet the needs of our logging industry and the recreational needs of the American people when we cut the forest service budget by 15 percent, as the President's budget does. And we don't believe that we ought to cut housing for disabled Americans by 47 percent or senior housing by 20 percent. In an age of high gas prices and high energy prices, we don't believe that we ought to cut the low-income heating assistance program by 18 percent. And let me say that Democrats are not the only ones who believe that. If you take a look and analyze the votes on the various appropriations bills that went through the House, you will see that on average we had 65 Republicans who voted with us in support of the appropriations bills that we sent over to the Senate. In fact, if you average out each of the rollcalls for each of the bills that passed, you will see that exactly two-thirds of this body voted for those bills. So I think we have established a bipartisan foundation in the House for moving forward, and I hope this continuing resolution gives us the necessary time to do that. I would hope that the Senate can move forward and complete its work on a bill-by-bill basis, but frankly, it is immaterial to me whether the bills are produced one by one or if they are produced in bunches. What counts is not the form. What counts is the substance. What counts is whether we make the right investments to make this country stronger over the long haul. That's our obligation, no matter how we package it. So I would once again simply urge the administration to sit down with us and begin to talk about how, as adults, we can reach a compromise on these issues. The President would have the country believe that we are blowing the lid outrageously on budgets and pouring money into the domestic budget. I would suggest that restoring $16 billion in Presidential cuts is mighty small potatoes in comparison to the $200 billion that he wants us to spend in Iraq and the $50 billion that he still wants us to provide for tax cuts for people making a million bucks a year. Let me remind the House, Mr. Speaker, that in 1980 the appropriations for domestic budgets equaled 4.8 percent of our total national income. Today, they have been reduced to 2.9 percent of our total national income, and the President's budget would take us, by the year 2012, down to 2.4 percent of the Nation's income. That means that we would have cut in half our investments relative to our national wealth. We would have cut in half those domestic investments since 1980. I don't believe, and I think there are many in both parties who don't believe, that that is the way that we build a stronger future for this country. So I would simply point out what we have here is an effort on our part to add about 2 percent to what the President is doing in the area of education, health care, science, law enforcement and all of that, and I'd simply suggest that, instead of continuing to talk about it, we sit down and have some more productive actions; we sit down and try to work out these differences between us so that we can leave town at a reasonable time, having completed our action on these bills and having met our responsibilities to make the investments that will, over the long haul, make this a stronger country. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. I'm ready to yield back.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time in opposition.

Mr. OBEY. Yes, I do.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the instructions of the House on the motion to recommit, I report H.J. Res. 52 back to the House with an amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I reserve a point of order.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 677, I call up the joint resolution (H.J. Res. 52) making continuing appropriations for the fiscal year 2008, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I want to urge support for this motion. As those in this House who know me well understand, I come from the State of Joe McCarthy. And one of the reasons that I changed political parties, because I grew up in a Republican family, is because I saw what the local McCarthy supporters did to the best teacher I ever had when they impugned his patriotism by calling him a Bolshevik back during the McCarthy heyday. And to this day there is nothing that gets my dander up more than to have someone's patriotism questioned on this House floor or anywhere else in the political realm. And if I'm going to get upset when that kind of juvenile activity occurs on the part of the political right, then I've got an obligation to be equally upset when that kind of juvenile debate emanates from the left. It seems to me that we all ought to recognize that we can have honest and profound differences with the policy that the general was selling 2 weeks ago without getting personal about it. I think what we ought to do is accept this motion, vote for it, send the continuing resolution to the Senate and get on with the business of negotiating out the content of these appropriation bills so that we can do our duty to the country. I yield back the balance of my time and ask for an ``aye'' vote.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentlewoman for the time. I simply cannot believe that Paul is gone. I first got to know him when we both served on a task force to rewrite the code of ethics in the nineties. That was not an easy job. Paul's performance was solid. It was thoughtful. In all the time that we discussed those issues before we brought our recommendations to the floor, I never saw him for one moment raise a partisan angle on any ethics question, and I never saw him question anyone else's motives. What I did see was a man who understood that ethics is important, and yet because it involves the rules of the House, it can also be exceedingly complicated. I never saw Paul take a single cheap shot in all the time that he served on that committee. That is one of the reasons that he became one of my favorite Republicans in this place, because there are very few people on either side of the aisle who aren't willing to take a cheap shot at the other side, even if it results in damage to the institution. That's where Paul drew the line. He didn't mind seeking partisan advantage. That's what all of us try to do from time to time. But what he always tried to do, in my judgment, was to seek whatever advantage he saw without taking advantage of the institution at the same time. That's an important line to draw in an institution like this. I think we can all be grateful for the job that Paul did for as long as God allowed him to do it. I simply cannot believe he is gone. I extend my sincere regrets and best wishes to his family and all the members of the Ohio delegation.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I'm sorry, but the record shows that in the year 2000, when you were chairman, on three occasions, Transportation, Labor-H and Agriculture, you reported self-executing rules.

Mr. OBEY. No. They were always Republican amendments, in contrast to this, which are both Republican and Democrat.

Mr. OBEY. No, we had determined that because they were in controversy, for the good of the House they should not be considered at this time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I think we again need to remind ourselves why we are here in this situation. And I don't like it, but we are here because people need to experience the consequences of their own actions, at least adults do. Why are we here? We are here because as the distinguished majority leader pointed out, despite the agreement that we felt we had reached for consideration of the appropriation bills, we had seen more than 4 hours of dilatory action the last time this bill was on the floor. As a result, this House was not able to complete action on a single provision in the agriculture appropriation bill even though we were told that the minority was really unhappy about something else totally unrelated to that bill. So they dragged this out for 4 hours during which we were able to accomplish nothing. At the same time, the President is on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. At the same time we have had foot-dragging on the part of the minority on this bill, the President held a press conference this morning in which he is attacking the Congress for not moving these bills at a sufficiently rapid speed. Secondly, I would point out that, as the distinguished majority leader indicated, we have spent some 86 hours more debating appropriation bills this session than we spent debating appropriation bills the previous session when the now-minority party was then in control. Why was that the case? Because last year we considered 144 amendments to those appropriation bills, whereas this year we have considered 339 amendments. That is a 77 percent increase. It illustrates why I keep referring to filibuster by way of amendment. There comes a time when we have to face the fact that if the public's work is to be done, we need to move these bills forward. It was very clear that this bill was going nowhere the last time it was on the floor. The distinguished majority leader informed the minority if that was the case, we would have to go to the Rules Committee in order to move the people's business forward. That is exactly what we have done. With respect to his criticism about this rule containing self- executing provisions, I would simply point out that on eight occasions when the gentleman from California was chairman, his committee reported out, and this House passed, self-executing rules. In 2000, it occurred on the Transportation, Labor-HHS and Agriculture bills. In 2001, it occurred on Agriculture, Treasury-Postal, Foreign Ops and Energy and Water. In 2002, it occurred on the Interior bill. And I have them before me. In each case, they contain the magic words ``provides that the amendment or amendments printed in the Rules Committee report accompanying the rule shall be considered as adopted.'' Let me simply point out that I think it is indeed regrettable that we have had to adopt this approach in order to finish the public's business on time. But in fact, if Members of the minority want to know why it was required, all they have to do is look in the mirror. Now I would yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier).

Mr. OBEY. Reclaiming my time, with all due respect, this amendment makes in order 14 amendments. The majority of those amendments are Republican amendments. One of them is an amendment by the gentleman from Arizona that in fact goes after a project in the district of the majority leader. That is hardly shutting down the process. Mr. Speaker, they were the ones who shut down the process 2 days ago when they refused to allow us to consider a single new amendment during a 4-hour period.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. Let me simply say the gentleman says we have ``shut down the appropriations process.'' That is absolute nonsense. We are making in order 12 amendments, all of them Republican amendments. Three of the six self-executing amendments are amendments that are sponsored in all or in part by Republicans. If anyone shut down the process, it was the minority party which filibustered for 4 hours the last time this bill was on the floor and didn't allow us to complete consideration of a single item in the bill. Not one. In addition to which when we tried to pursue a unanimous consent agreement before that bill hit the floor, we were denied that opportunity by the minority party. We had an understanding with the minority party that these bills would be finished in roughly equivalent time to that which was taken last year. The minority party was so angry about a bill that was going to extend health care to 5 million additional kids they walked away from that agreement, and that's why we are here today.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, let me simply say that of all people, the gentleman who just spoke is way off base when he cries about being denied an opportunity to deal with an amendment. It was his amendment for $50,000 that this House debated for 4 hours without coming to a resolution thereon because of the filibuster that was being conducted on that side of the aisle. To suggest that somehow that Member, who single-handedly held us up for 4 hours, to suggest that he was denied, is a joke.

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

Mr. OBEY. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. Let me simply say the reason these amendments are in the self-executing rule is that we agree with you that under the circumstances they should not be in the bill. As I warned the House when we first started bringing appropriation bills to the floor, our committee did not have enough time to adequately get all of these amendments that were coming at us, and so we asked for a process which would allow us during the month of August to review all of them. In the end the House decided they did not want to do that. One of the major reasons is because Members of your party wanted to make certain that we had an opportunity to deal with them on the floor now. I warned at the time that meant that mistakes would be made. They were. When we caught the mistake, I went to the Rules Committee and Mr. Mollohan agreed that under the circumstances they ought to come out. We ought to be congratulated for it, rather than being questioned about it.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I think it is important for Members on both sides of the aisle to understand what is going to transpire here. This is a filibuster masquerading as an amendment. This amendment cuts $50,000, a tiny, tiny symbolic sum, from the administrative account in question. But, as I see it, this is not a real amendment. What it means is that it simply affords those who offer it, under the guise of talking about spending, to really engage in delay and delay and delay. Because their goal, if they can, is to not have the House finish its appropriations business. Their goal, also, if they can, is to delay the SCHIP bill from coming to the floor and finally being passed by the House. So after we have seen this administration and their allies in this House borrow $1.2 trillion to pay for tax cuts and after we have seen them borrow another $600 billion to finance that misbegotten war in Iraq, now they pretend that they are contributing to the public good by offering to cut spending by $50,000; not $50 billion, but $50,000. This is, in plain language, a filibuster. It is the first of many amendments that are being offered by people who are so opposed to the SCHIP proposition, which will be before us tomorrow, that they would prefer to defend $50 billion in tax cuts for people making $1 million a year than they would to see 5 million more kids covered by health insurance in this country. That is really what is afoot here. Mr. Chairman, I find myself only mildly amused, because the subject really is serious. I find myself only mildly amused by the fact that, 3 days ago, we had the President announce another large, massive increase in foreign aid which he wants us to provide yet this year. We also now increasingly are coming to understand that the President will be asking for an extension of the surge in Iraq, which will require him to ask the Congress to spend an extra $25 billion to $30 billion above and beyond $140 billion he is planning to ask for in the supplemental already for this year for Iraq. So, yet, we are here mired today in this let's-pretend Potemkin debate over $50,000. We don't, on this side of the aisle, intend to get bogged down; at least, we don't intend to contribute to the bogging down. So we will let them drone on, drone on and drone on with their Lilliputian amendments. Meanwhile, we recognize what is happening: If the other side wants to delay the people's business for a while, all that means is that, in the end, our colleagues won't be going home on Friday, they won't be going home on Saturday, and we will still be having Sunday dinner together. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Point of order, Mr. Chairman.