Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. There are no earmarks in this bill. I personally have no interest in adding them. If it happens in the process because of the will of the committee or the body, then they will be in the bill when it comes back to the House and then the gentleman's point of order will be in order.

Mr. OBEY. If you will take a look at the time that was taken for every bill last year, that time that we have been talking about included the entire time for consideration of the bill. So for example, when we say it took 17 hours and 12 minutes for the Commerce-Justice bill last year, that means it took 17 hours and 12 minutes to do the entire bill from start to finish. Only a part of that time was represented by the time allocated to amendments. All we are saying is that it is our hope that we can keep each of these bills to roughly the same amount of total time. If you need some flexibility between the bills, the statement makes clear and the understanding is that we will try to show that flexibility so long as it is not abused.

Mr. OBEY. Let me simply say that when we compiled these numbers, since there was no Labor-H bill considered last year, we simply looked at the amount of time that it took the previous year to consider the Labor-H bill, and that was 12 hours and 43 minutes. So I think that in 12 hours and 43 minutes, if Members have an objection to an earmark or any other provision, they are going to manage to find a way to bring it to the attention of the House. And if they can't figure out how, I would just ask that you talk to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) and she will show you how to do it. She's got a lot of experience.

Mr. OBEY. Let me say, and then be very blunt about this, this agreement requires a lot of trust between people. I've had to rely on a lot of trust on the minority leader tonight, and I expect to have the right to expect the same consideration from others in this House. We have not had much experience in the last 14 years at either producing or delaying reports. That has been the prerogative of the majority party. We're now the majority; and as you know, we had a lot of catch-up work to do from the last session, and we've been working long hours. It is not our responsibility to run the printing office. Sometimes we don't have control over when documents are printed. Sometimes the process breaks down there; sometimes it doesn't. All I can assure the gentleman is that we are going to try to comply not only with the letter but the spirit of the rules of the House. When I was in the minority, I was pushing very hard to see the 3-day practice maintained, even though the rule had been changed to 2 days. We intend to continue to do that.

Mr. OBEY. The answer to the gentleman's question is ``yes.''

Mr. OBEY. Let me be very frank. I haven't had time to consider any of these questions because I have been so tied up simply trying to move bills. All I can tell you is we will comply with whatever the rules of the House are. Frankly, at this point, I am not exactly sure what they are. Whatever they are, I will comply with them.

Mr. OBEY. No one is trying to hold back information. What I need is time to know what that information is. With respect to the certifications you are talking about, they will be available in the committee office to the public, to Members of Congress, and they will meet whatever requirements, whatever other requirements of the rules that there are. All I can tell you is that we haven't given any consideration to earmarks at this point because we haven't had time to. I think the agreement that we have here tonight finally recognizes the fact that if we're going to proceed with these bills, that we simply haven't had time to produce the initial earmarks. We are slowing down this process considerably. I want to assure you that we're going to do everything we possibly can to comply with the spirit and the letter of the law. The gentleman knows me. I hope the gentleman regards me as someone who is up to his commitments. That's all I can honestly say.

Mr. OBEY. No one is trying to make anything difficult for any Member to review anything. I don't know what experience you had under the last regime. We have not had an opportunity to perform on that yet.

Mr. OBEY. With all due respect, I take no responsibility for anything done by any authorizing committee.

Mr. OBEY. If the gentleman would yield, one of the reasons I have been trying to explain to the House why it takes so long to carefully screen these earmarks, is because many of the requests that come in are so vague that we don't understand where that money is intended to go to. So then we have to go to the individual Member, and we have to say, hey, we really can't tell from your request where this is supposed to go. You need to change your request so we know what you are talking about. Then we have to sort them out so we know that you don't have three people asking for the same thing in different language. That takes a lot of time. So if the gentleman thinks that sometimes you're confused, so are we. That's why we were asking for more time. I want to stipulate one thing. I recommended to this House a proposal that I thought would give us the best possibility of avoiding future embarrassment. This agreement indicates the House wants to go in a somewhat different direction. That means that with respect to almost all of these bills, we will have less time for our staff to review them than would have been the case under the proposal that I was suggesting. In my judgment, that means that we will run a higher risk of mistakes than we would have otherwise had, because we will not have the entire month of July for the staff to review these requests. So I am giving up on that expectation for a higher level of staff review so that we can continue to do the people's business and get through these bills in time for program managers to get funding out for these programs in an orderly manner. So a lot of us have a lot of complaints about this. I didn't invent the earmark process. If I had my way, there wouldn't be any, as the gentleman knows. But it's my job as chairman not to pursue what I believe. It's my job to try to find a balanced point in the House that I think will achieve consensus in the House, hopefully between two parties. That's what I would try to do, and I will appreciate the recognition of that fact from the gentleman and every other Member of this body.

Mr. OBEY. Even though the Senate is resisting, I am the person who ended the earmarks. I am the person who put a moratorium on earmarks for a year. You know that two-thirds of your caucus and two-thirds of my caucus were mad as hell at me when I did that.

Mr. OBEY. I am now trying, and so is our leadership, to reduce earmarks by at least 50 percent. As you know, there are a lot of people who are angry about the fact that we are cutting earmarks by that much.

Mr. OBEY. With all due respect, the letters requesting earmarks are not going to be made public. Let me explain what will be made public. I will take responsibility for every earmark that I recommend. But I have no intention of taking responsibility for somebody's pipe dream that we reject.

Mr. OBEY. I have already told you those will be available. I don't know how many times I have to chew my tongue, but I have already told you.

Mr. OBEY. With all due respect, we will comply with the House Rules. That's the best assurance I can give the gentleman.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that, during further consideration of H.R. 2638 pursuant to House Resolution 473, the Chair may reduce to 2 minutes the minimum time for electronic voting under clause 6 of rule XVII and clauses 8 and 9 of rule XX.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I hadn't intended to speak on this matter until I heard my friend from Kentucky refer to certain words in the language that would be stricken by this amendment as being ``frivolous.'' Let me tell you what he apparently considers frivolous to be. The language reads as follows: ``Provided further that none of the funds under this heading may be obligated for fencing or tactical infrastructure project or activity unless the Secretary formally consults with affected State and local communities to solicit their advice and support of such project or activity.'' Isn't that a terrible thing to do? Can you imagine the Congress of the United States, in all of its imperial wisdom, having the temerity to allow someone else besides all-knowing Members of Congress to comment before the Secretary proceeds with the activity outlined on this page? I thought that people in this Congress had the feeling that local people ought to have a say in what happens. I did not realize that the new motto of the minority party, of the Republican party was: ``Only the Feds know.'' Now, in another appropriation bill, with respect to energy, we had the issue of whether or not local governments should be consulted before the Federal Government imposed the route for a power line which would run through the property of private property owners, run through farms, run through homes of the elderly. And the question was whether or not those folks would have some say, and whether the State government would have some say, or whether all-knowing Uncle Sam would impose its judgment. What an incredible confession of arrogance. What an incredible confession that ``I know better than anybody else''. You might. But the language you're striking simply says that we should formally consult other levels of government before a unilateral decision is required of the Secretary. I think the language speaks for itself. This amendment is incredibly arrogant, and I would suggest a ``no'' vote on the amendment.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I had not intended to speak, and I certainly am not directing my comments to the gentleman who just spoke, but I do want to make a few comments about the issue of so-called earmarks. For the last 2 days, Member after Member in this institution have traipsed to the well or stood at the committee table and misdescribed and mischaracterized my proposals and the proposals that several other Democrats have made to reform the earmarking process. I would simply say, I would have been greatly, if I had had any regard at all for those who were making those statements, I would have been upset. Let me simply say there are many Members--well, that is not true. There are some Members who have embarrassed this institution by the carelessness of their earmarks who came to the well and sounded off as so-called champions of reform. There are Members who have come up to me and chastised me because I was insisting on a 50 percent reduction on earmarks; who have sent me letters asking for earmark after earmark after earmark. And there are a great many Members of this body who are not members of the Appropriations Committee who seem to have a memory lapse and forget that the bridge to nowhere, and most of the actions by Mr. Cunningham had nothing to do with the appropriations process; they occurred on legislation out of other committees. I want to make clear, I hate the earmarking process. I absolutely detest it, not because earmarks are wrong, I think 90 percent of the earmarks attached by Members of both parties are perfectly legitimate, and they are a whole lot more on target than the misdirected spending of some of our bureaucrats and the misdirected analysis of OMB, and I know that from personal experience. The reason I hate earmarks is because they suck everybody in. They suck them into the idea that we have to be ATM machines for our districts, and so they focus on the tiny portion of most bills that are earmarks instead of focusing on the policy that is represented by the legislation that we produce. It's a whole lot more important to know whether we have adequately funded education or whether we have funded the right programs in education and refused to add funding to some of the worst programs in education than it is to know whether a Member got a $200,000 earmark for an after-school center. I want the public to know all of that. Every earmark I've ever gotten I believe I've put out a press release and talked as loud as I could and tried to get as much attention to it as I could, because I believed in it. But what I don't believe in is people who walk both sides of the street. I could tell you what they call them in my hometown. The letter begins with W, and I just want to say that I'm going to be very interested in seeing which Members ask for earmarks and which don't, and I'm going to be very interested in seeing which Members vote for the amendment that I intend to attach to every appropriation bill, which would call for a total elimination on earmarks. I want to see how many of you actually vote for it. I want to see how many of you do not give hypocrisy a bad name. I thank the House for its attention.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move that the Committee do now rise.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I want to say that I think this bill being brought forth today is an excellent bill. It will strengthen America's security, and every Member interested in doing that ought to vote for it. The four security-related appropriation bills which we will bring to the floor, Military Construction, Homeland Security, State/Foreign Operations and Defense, will come in at a level about $2 billion above the President's request. This is a key bill in doing that. I do want to make a few comments about what I understand was said while I was off the floor a few minutes ago with respect to earmarks. Let us trace what the facts are. The last time the Democrats controlled the appropriations process, I was chairman of the Appropriations Committee. In those days, earmarking was focused on about four subcommittees. There were no earmarks whatsoever in the Labor-Health- Education bill the year that I was chairman. Two years ago, there were over 3,000 when the Republicans were running the show. When we took over the Congress last year, the Republicans had not passed a single appropriation bill on the domestic side of the ledger. So we had to complete their work for them. And one of the ways we did that was to put a moratorium on all earmarks for the year. We promised at the time that we would try to resurrect the process, provided that we had a process that was more transparent. Now, I understand someone from the other side claimed that we were going to airdrop these earmarks into the conference with no notice. Not so. What we plan to do is the following. And let me say, we didn't not preclude earmarks by choice. The simple fact is that because we had to deal with last year's Republican budget, because we had to deal with the Iraq controversy which consumed the next 3 months of staff time, because we were under subpoena by the San Diego U.S. Attorney to turn over papers related to Republican shenanigans that occurred last year, we did not have the staff time to focus on the substance of the bills for this year or earmarks. And we finally decided that we need to keep the bills moving, even if that meant that we would have to play catchup later with the earmarks. So what we are going to do is as soon as the staff can prepare them, and we estimate it will take at least 4 to 5 weeks to screen all of those earmarks, we will submit and put in the Congressional Record a description of virtually every earmark that we intend to try to include in conference reports. We will then ask every Member to review those projects. If they have questions, raise questions about them, we will then ask the sponsor of the earmark to respond in writing, so that the person responsible for the request is the person who has to explain to the House what is going on. And then we will use our judgment about what makes sense. If the House thinks that we have got projects in there that shouldn't be in there, they can vote against the bill. But let me point out there is a big difference between what we are doing and the existing Republican process. It took 2 years after the fact to find out what Duke Cunningham was asking for. The fact is under our process, you will know 30 days ahead of time. It took us more than a year to find out about the Florida road that was evidently inserted in the highway bill by a Republican Member of this House from another State. That can't happen in our process. Under our process, you will have 30 days to review what they request. That is a sweeping reform in comparison to the absolute, behind-the-scenes operation that existed when the Republicans controlled this House.

Mr. OBEY. Madam Chairman, the comments of the previous speaker simply indicate how little she understands about the appropriations process. The fact is that the Iraqi bill we had to deal with was last year's supplemental request. Last year's, not this year's, so we had to clean up your mess on the entire domestic budget; and we had to clean up your mess on Iraq before we could move on our business. The first week we have been able to turn to our agenda is this week. We have spent the last 5 months cleaning up your spilled milk.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I rise to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I would like to follow through on the comments made by the distinguished chairman of the subcommittee. And I think for Members who aren't here, which is approximately 90 percent of the body, for Members who are watching in their offices or perhaps not watching at all, I should make clear what is happening here and what is not happening here. We are not having a real debate on a real bill. What is happening is a debate, it is really ``filibuster by amendment.'' It has been made quite clear by the opposition leadership that the opposition party intends to bring this institution to a halt today. And the way they intend to do that is by offering amendment after amendment after amendment. There are about 120 amendments pending. And as the gentleman from North Carolina has indicated, we are trying to responsibly deal with a budget from an administration of the other party. The easiest thing in the world for us to do would be for us to gut and slash the administrative accounts in the bill for any department, because, after all, the administration is Republican and we are Democratic. But what we have tried to do instead is to meet our responsibilities. We tried to tie administrative budget levels to the actual needs of the agencies, and we have tried to deal with those agencies in a bipartisan manner. But we have a series of amendments not taking any meaningful reductions out of these agency budgets. We have a series of very tiny nicks being taken out of these budgets. And these amendments, in my judgement, are designed more to take up the time of this body than they are to produce a different financial result. And as the gentleman from North Carolina indicates, we have been, for the last 2 hours, trying to defend an administrative budget for the other party's administration. Now, we may not be the smartest folks in the world, but we haven't exactly fallen off a turnip truck. And I also think that we are not exactly cut out to be suckers. And so, I don't think that we can allow our friends on the other side of the aisle to assume that we will simply serve as punching bags, and that we will simply stand here continuing to defend administration operation accounts. And so, as far as I am concerned, if the administration and if the minority party's leadership can't control their own Members in terms of these budgetary attacks on these agencies, then who are we to stand in the way? So, I think what happens to these administrative levels will be pretty much up to the administration's own party. It will be very interesting to watch.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Let me, once again, not that anyone on the other side of the aisle is interested in listening to facts, but let me, once again, cite what the facts are. We keep hearing this mythical, robotic claim from the other side of the aisle that somehow these earmarks are going to be dropped in in conference. Well, it is not our fault that you couldn't finish the budget last year and we had to finish your work. It is not our fault that you couldn't finish the work on the Iraqi bill for 2007, so we had to spend the last 3 months cleaning up your mess on that one. Announcement By the Chairman

Mr. OBEY. It is not our fault that we had to spend at least 60 days answering questions from the San Diego prosecutor about shenanigans that occurred on your side of the aisle in the last year. That occupied the staff for an incredible amount of time. Announcement By the Chairman

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I won't say, I won't direct it directly to them. I will simply direct it to you. It is not our fault that the San Diego attorney subpoenaed records from our committee relating to shenanigans that were conducted on the other side of the aisle in the previous Congress under Republican control.