Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would rather not talk about what one party did one year and what one party did another year, because I think there is substantial support in both parties for the bill that we have before us today. I want to walk through what the impact of this cut would be on this bill. If we pass this amendment, we will be cutting $1.2 billion from No Child Left Behind, the President's signature education set of programs. We will be cutting $684 million from Title I grants. We will be cutting $519 million from IDEA. That's a program which both parties have fought for the last 3 days to try to increase. We would be cutting $717 million from Pell Grants, reducing scholarship awards for millions of students, despite the fact that the cost of higher education has gone up by 40 percent the last 5 years. We would be cutting $1.4 billion from the National Institutes of Health, money that we use to combat cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's and the like. We would be cutting $100 million from community health centers, denying needed health care and dental services to almost half a million people. We would be cutting $53 million out of the President's request to prepare the country for a potential pandemic flu. We would be cutting $320 million from Head Start, $98 million from Child Care Development Block Grant. We would be cutting $446 million from the Social Security Administration, denying the resources that agency needs to maintain and keep open its local offices and reduce backlogs of disability and SSI claims. So people have a choice. What's more important, their own accounting sheets or these investments in the country? The fact is, with the exception of the gang of four, virtually every Republican who has offered an amendment has done the same thing that Democrats have tried to do. They have tried to find ways to increase programs that they think are important to the country's future. I would submit I don't think those Republicans are out of step, and I don't think those Democrats are out of step. I think the folks who are out of step are the gang of four offering the amendments. I believe that most Americans, and I think most Republicans, would rather invest the funds now to prepare our workforce to be better trained, our kids to be better educated, and our health care system to be more efficient and more and more humane. That is what this bill is all about, and I think that there is a bipartisan consensus in this House to stick with this bill. So I would urge respectfully rejection of the amendment, as I make one other point. We have the $1.4 billion initiative of add-ons to try to discourage women from having abortions. Instead of lectures, we provide resources to make their lives better if they decide to have those kids. This bill would cut about 40 percent of that initiative out of the bill. I happen to think that initiative is too important to sandbag, and this amendment sandbags that effort. So I would urge rejection of the amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, some simple facts. The President's budget would have us spend as a share of our total national income 48 percent less on education, health care, science, job training, et cetera, than this country spent in 1980, and by 2012 he would have us spend 57 percent less than we spent in 1980. That creates a problem because we're going to have 27 million more Americans in the next 10 years. We're going to have 12 million more seniors needing health care. We're going to have 2.7 million more kids in elementary and secondary school. We're going to have 2.2 million more students in college. And, unless we change our ways, we're going to have 11 million more Americans without health insurance. That's why we don't want to go back to last year. We want to move ahead to try to deal with the problems coming at us. We see them; they're there. We ought not to stick our head in the ground like an ostrich. We ought to deal with them, and that's what this bill does.

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

Mr. OBEY. Madam Chairman, I would like to again simply walk us through what this cut means in specific terms. This amendment would cut $257 million from the President's No Child Left Behind education flagship program. It would cut $144 million from title I, denying more than 40,000 students those title I services. It would cut $113 million from Special Education. It would wipe out every single amendment but one that was passed on this floor in the last 2 days to enhance Special Education, most of those amendments coming from the Republican side of the aisle. It would cut $156 million from Pell Grants. It would cut $300 million from the National Institutes of Health for medical research in cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and the like. It would cut $22 million from community health centers. Over 100,000 of the uninsured would not have access to those services. It would cut $70 million from Head Start, $21 million from the Child Care Development Block Grant. It would cut $27 million from LIHEAP. I want to remind you, in LIHEAP, the bill itself only restores half of the cut that was made last year by the President and the Congress. It would cut $97 million from the Social Security Administration. Members are climbing all over me saying, ``What are we going to do to keep my local Social Security offices open? What are we going to do to eliminate the multi-month backlog in people applying for Social Security disability?'' I will tell you what they are going to do. This will add to it. It will add to the problem. So with all due respect to the sanctimony that we hear from those who belatedly cry about the Federal deficit, I didn't hear them crying about the Federal deficit when they voted to spend $600 billion on an ill-advised war in Iraq. I don't hear them crying about the fact that $57 billion in tax cuts for millionaires adds $57 billion to the Federal deficit. So I just think we need to recognize that I believe the vast majority of Americans and I believe substantial portions of both parties in this House believe that this bill is responsible in real dollar terms. All of the domestic appropriation bills that we will produce and have produced this year amount to a 1 percent increase in real terms. One of the gentlemen over there claimed that these were not cuts. Well, let me tell you something. If you appropriate the same amount of money this year that you appropriated last year but inflation eats away at that and so does population growth, if you don't adjust for inflation and population growth, then to each recipient of the services under this legislation there is indeed a cut to them. And that is what counts. It is the impact on their pocketbook. It is the impact on their ability to get help to send their kids to school. It is an impact on the couple in my District who called 31 dentists to try to get some help with their kid who had to have the braces taken off his teeth. They couldn't get any of them to take them because the dentists wouldn't take Medicaid patients. They didn't have a local clinic. So the mother held the kid down while the father took the braces off with a pair of pliers. That wouldn't happen to any child of a Member of Congress. The gentleman is smiling about that. I don't think that is anything to smile about. I met that woman.

Mr. OBEY. Yes, sir.

Mr. OBEY. I understand. But let me simply say, Madam Chairman, these cuts, these will be cuts in terms of the services that we are trying to provide to these people. It is immoral. It is unconscionable that we allow 44 million Americans to go without health insurance. This bill will deliver health care coverage to 2 million more Americans than got it last year. It will make up in a tiny way for the indifference, the massive indifference, which has characterized this country the past few years on the issue of health coverage. I would urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment and support for the underlying bill.

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

Mr. OBEY. Madam Chairman, it is sometimes amazing to me just how small some congressional debates can be. We have heard a lot of bloviating on this floor today about whether something is a cut and whether it isn't a cut. We have had a boy scout debate about dictionary terms. But the real question to ask about this bill is simply to ask, is it adequate to the needs of the country? Do we really need to simply continue the status quo by going back to last year's level, or do we need to recognize that there is more than one deficit in the country? Do we really think that we can afford to continue to avoid dealing with the deficit in educational quality, the deficit in health care access, the deficit in worker training? Do we really think that we can avoid, or that we can afford to avoid investing to increase the number of quality teachers in this country? Do we think that we need to do more or not to help millions of kids who need a better deal in special education? Do we need to do more than we are doing now to help workers who lose their life's work because of the forces of globalization? Are we comfortable continuing to see the number of research grants for cancer, for heart disease, for Parkinson's disease, continue to decline, or do we think that we ought to make an investment, a collective societal investment, so that we can do more to attack those diseases? Those are values questions. That is what we have to decide here today. This amendment is largely symbolic. It gives people a chance on both sides to talk to some more, as though we haven't, God help us, talked enough already. But we are now roughly at the point where we will have to decide what our priorities are. This bill is about 2 percent above the President's budget for these items. That is what we are talking about; we are talking about devoting 2 percent more of the Federal budget than the President wants to devote to deal with the deficits in education, health care, job training, worker protection, and the like. Each Member is invited, in my view, to make their own choice, but I think the choice is clear. We have had a huge increase in the gap between the richest people in this country and everybody else over the past 20 years. This bill attempts to deal with the results of that gap by providing additional grace notes to help the people who haven't been in that top 1 percent so they get a little better deal in sending their kids to college, so that they get a little better deal in being able to find doctors who will take care of them without begging in the community health clinic, so they can find some job training so they maybe can get a job that pays two-thirds of what their job paid before they were bounced because of bad trade deals or globalization. That is what this bill attempts to do. It has traditionally had bipartisan support through the years in this country. It would be a shame if that bipartisan support didn't continue. I urge rejection of the amendment and support for the underlying bill. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Madam Chairman, I really wish that the gentleman had not offered this amendment, and let me be very frank. I spent most of the last 6 months trying to convince Democrats, primarily liberals, who are now in control of the House, not to try to use their new majority to change any language in this bill that had anything to do with abortion or family planning. I have asked them, in an effort to provide bipartisan support for this bill, to recognize other people's values as well as their own. I have asked them, therefore, to leave alone the six abortion-related or family planning provisions which are in the existing law which many on this side of the aisle oppose and some on the other side of the aisle oppose. I have asked them to leave alone the Hyde amendment; I have asked them to leave alone Dr. Weldon's amendment. And I had some real fights on this side of the aisle about that, not just with people in my caucus, but with a lot of outside groups. A lot of like-minded people on the left will get together and talk and, after they talk to each other, they think they have taken a public opinion poll. And I have asked them to lay off this bill so that we can try to find common ground on an issue that has divided us for so long. And we put together an initiative which provided well over half a billion dollars in special funding for programs to help discourage women from having abortions, and we have been able to keep that issue out of here. I have asked Members not to offer amendments on any of these items. But now, in return for that, we get from the other side of the aisle from one gentleman an amendment that in essence upsets the apple cart. I think that is unfortunate. I can't do a whole lot about it, but I think the gentleman knows that an amendment like this would not survive conference anyway, and yet it is being offered. And what it does, at the last minute, is to blow up a consensus which we have tried to build over the last 3 days that we all ought to be willing to live under the same laws that we were living under when the Republicans were controlling this House and when they passed the legislation that I am now defending. So I would simply ask the gentleman, in the interest of our being able to work together on these issues, to withdraw his amendment. He doesn't like Planned Parenthood. I don't care whether Planned Parenthood gets money or not. What I do care about is that the women who are served by Planned Parenthood get the services to which they are entitled under the Constitution. And so I would ask the gentleman, in the interest of the bipartisan neutrality that we have tried to build over the past 2 months, to consider withdrawing the amendment, and I thank the gentleman for the time.

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

Mr. OBEY. Madam Chairman, the issue here is not Planned Parenthood. The issue is whether women have a right to have full access to family planning. State health departments run 57 percent of the clinics that receive Title X funds. Planned Parenthood affiliates operate 14 percent of Title X supported clinics. Hospitals and family planning clinics and other non-privates make up the rest of the Title X clinic system. Under the law, none of these funds can be spent for abortion. But Planned Parenthood clinics use their Title X funding to provide family planning and health services to millions of women, and it is those women who would be hurt today by this action, not Planned Parenthood. I would urge a vote against the amendment. It seems to me that we ought to be content to live under the same arrangements that we were content to live under when the Republican Congresses were writing the law. It seems to me that we need to be finding ways to avoid dividing the Congress and dividing the country because of our ideologies. This amendment has nothing to do with abortion. It has everything to do with whether or not we are trying to find common ground on this cluster of issues, and whether or not women are going to be allowed to get the services they need in areas where the only services available to them come from the organization in question. With that, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. OBEY. Madam Chairman, this amendment is not related to abortion. This amendment is a frontal assault on family planning. Make no mistake about it. Whether you are pro-life or whether you are pro-choice or anything in between, you ought to be pro-family planning. And this amendment negates that, and I would urge defeat of the amendment. If I have any time left, I would yield to the gentlewoman from California.

Mr. OBEY. Will the gentleman from Iowa yield?

Mr. OBEY. We've been asking Members through the day if they would drop their remarks if we accept their amendments so that Members can catch their planes. Would the gentleman be willing to do that?

Mr. OBEY. In that case we'll accept the amendment on this side of the aisle. In accepting this amendment, I would make the following two points: One, I believe it is merely a re-statement of current law which already prohibits the employment of unauthorized aliens. I do not read it as imposing any new burdens on those who use funds appropriated under this Act. Rather it is fully consistent with the current legal obligations imposed on all employers, regardless of whether or not they use such funds. Two, I am concerned that the amendment may place an undue enforcement burden on the agencies that receive funding under this bill. I plan to discuss that aspect with the administration.

Mr. OBEY. Again, would the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. Same deal.

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

Mr. OBEY. My understanding is that there are no further amendments or colloquies left on either side of the aisle. Is that his understanding, also?

Mr. OBEY. Madam Chairman, I move that the Committee do now rise and report the bill back to the House with sundry amendments, with the recommendation that the amendments be agreed to and that the bill, as amended, do pass.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, again, I want to thank Members of both parties who have helped through the process. I urge a ``no'' vote on this motion and a bipartisan ``yes'' vote on final passage. parliamentary inquiries

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

Mr. OBEY. Again, the same deal, if we accept the amendment. We are trying to help get Members out of here.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Madam Chairman, I wonder how any of us would like to have our future decided by people we have never met or never even seen on the basis of those people having a 10-minute conversation without our being present. I don't think any of us would like that very much, and yet that is what the gentleman is asking us to do. The gentleman, in effect, is asking us to pass sentence on 150,000 students who applied for student financial assistance last year using the Spanish version of the application form. Those students would automatically be denied financial aid, with no demonstrable proof that they were illegal aliens, only because they felt more comfortable applying in Spanish. Now, I want every American--I want every person who comes to this country to learn English. I hope our values are the cement that holds this country together, but I think that English is a great tool to strengthen that cement. But I really would simply suggest that, first of all, this is the wrong venue. The Appropriations Committee has held no hearings on this matter. So far as I know, the gentleman has held no hearings on this matter. He may have very strong opinions; I do, too. But both of our opinions may be irrelevant when we discover what the facts are. The fact is, if something like this is going to happen, if we are going to make decisions that affect people's career possibilities just for the heck of it, it would be nice if we had thought about it rather than jumped onto the nearest slogan masquerading as an amendment. So I would strongly urge that this House show a sense of fairness and a sense of restraint and decline to support the gentleman's amendment, at least until we have had hearings in the proper committee. That is the way we would do things if we are concerned with due process, if we are concerned with maximizing fairness rather than scoring political points. Madam Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.