Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I demand the gentleman's words be taken down.

Mr. OBEY. The gentleman referred to us as producing ``bribe-as-you- go'' legislation.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, let me simply congratulate the gentleman for withdrawing those words.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hare).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek). (Mr. MEEK of Florida asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Wynn). (Mr. WYNN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished caucus chairman, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time for tomorrow.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, 4 years ago this Congress voted to authorize the President to engage in a preemptive attack to Iraq, a country that had not attacked the United States. I supported the military action against Afghanistan because they gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and those who attacked us on 9/11. But I opposed the President's unilateral and preemptive attack on Iraq, because I believed that this action would destabilize the Middle East, isolate us in world opinion, and weaken our influence in the world. Our opposition was vilified. Our patriotism was questioned, and that continues today. We are told that if we oppose the President's intensification of the war, we are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Well, I, for one, am tired of those who have been consistently wrong about this war lecturing those of us who have been right from the start. I am tired of the manipulation of intelligence by this administration. I am tired of the stubbornness of an administration that didn't have a clue about the Middle East realities when they got us into this mess, and don't have a clue now about how to get us out. Sadly, there will be no happy endings to this war. The President's policy has done so much damage that there is no good way for us to get out, whether it happens in 6 months or a year or 5 years. Our troops won the war, God bless them. But the problem with the President's plan is that it calls upon our troops to do something they do not have the power to do, and that is to convince the Iraqi factions to stop killing each other and work together on a political compromise. Instead of the President's surge, in my view, we should set a rough target for repositioning our troops out of the area. We should recognize that Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, will never join together in a strong central government. We should tell the Iraqis that if they do not amend their Constitution to allow for a loose confederation with an oil sharing agreement between the Sunnis and the Shiites, that we will leave them to each others' tender mercies. We should participate in regional discussions with all parties, including Syria and Iran. We should resume aggressive leadership to resurrect a meaningful Middle East process, peace process, and Congress should pass legislation prohibiting an attack on Iran without authorization by this Congress. Given the chaos that the administration's policy has produced, none of these suggestions may work. But all of them would be better than continuing to be stuck in another 5-year period in an endless war with endless promises to the American people and with endless failures on the ground.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentlewoman for the time. Mr. Speaker, let me simply make a few observations about the gentleman's comments. With respect to the forest funded school program that he is talking about, it needs to be understood that is not within the jurisdiction of our committee. The problem with that program is that the authorizing committee has allowed that program to expire, and it is a mandatory program. Any time the Appropriations Committee tries to involve itself in mandatory programs we get skinned by people on both sides of the aisle, and we are told to mind our own business. We have. I am very sympathetic about the gentleman's problem, but this is not an appropriated program. The Appropriations Committee deals with discretionary spending, not mandatory spending.

Mr. OBEY. Surely.

Mr. OBEY. But the fact is we have not reauthorized expired programs. That is the difference. We do not have the authority to reauthorize a mandatory program. If we did, we would have to find another $320 million, and I would like to know where that offset is going to come from.

Mr. OBEY. The gentleman is right to want this program to continue, but he is wrong if he thinks that the Appropriations Committee is the proper venue for it.

Mr. OBEY. I would prefer not to. I only have 5 minutes. The gentleman as the bill manager has more time than I do.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield for 30 seconds.

Mr. OBEY. I understand that. We had nine other requests to do the same thing. If we had done so, Members on your side of the aisle would have come and attacked us and scalped us for doing things that we had no business doing. So he can't have it both ways, which is what many Members in the minority are trying to do today. I would be happy to join with the gentleman in urging the authorizing committee to fix the problem, but it is not within our purview to do. With that, I take back the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I don't want to prolong the comments on the rule. Let me simply say that the majority had 8 months to deal with the most basic responsibility of a legislative body, which is to pass the Federal budget. They were in the majority. They now are not. Now they are in the minority. We are trying to clean up their spilt milk, and they can squawk all they want about how we did it. The fact is, there are no new issues here. Virtually every single issue that will be debated today was already debated when we passed the appropriation bills. These are the bills that the House passed last summer in the previous session of the Congress. We had hundreds of amendments to these bills. Now because the Republicans in the House couldn't convince the Republicans in the Senate to vote for these bills, we have before us what is, in essence, a pre-conferenced conference report, and we have boiled down this almost 1,000 pages. This is what it would look like if we had an omnibus appropriation bill. We would have had 1,000 pages of legislative material. We have boiled it down to about 150 pages. We have basically decided to stick with the fiscal year 2006 basic funding level for most programs. We try to then adjust programs for agencies so that they don't have to lay off workers, so that they don't have to have furloughs, such as the Social Security Department and the FBI, who both told us that they desperately needed these adjustments or they would have to shut down their operations or lay off people. We then decided that there are some priorities on both sides of the aisle, and we used almost $10 billion, which we had cut from other portions of the bill, to finance those items. You may not like the choices we have made, but, in contrast to the last Congress which ducked its responsibility to make these choices, at least we have made the choices. At least we have made them, and we are going to vote on this today. We are going to send it to the Senate so that when the President submits his new budget on February 5, he has a clean slate and so do we, and that is the way it ought to be.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, we have just heard unmitigated nonsense from the gentleman. The gentleman is somehow claiming that we are funding that silly rain forest that your party agreed to 2 years ago in Iowa. The fact is that Senator Byrd and I made clear we would provide no earmarks in the 2006 bill.

Mr. OBEY. I am not going to yield, so let me finish my thought. The gentleman does it all the time, and it is highly rude.

Mr. OBEY. I would simply point out that we had no requirement to retroactively go back 2 years earlier and repeal silly things that your side of the aisle did 2 years ago. There is not a dollar in this bill for that rain forest. You know it as well as I do. Quit trying to pretend otherwise.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, my only response to some of the comments I have heard from the other side of the aisle is, you are really something else. You are really something else. You spent all of the last year trying to pass appropriation bills. You passed all but one through the House. You could not get your Republican friends in the Senate to support any of them. So when you relinquished your duties we had no domestic budget for the coming year. I offered on the floor to make any substantive compromises necessary when you were still in control. I offered to make any procedural concessions necessary to enable you to pass the bills on your watch. You did not do it. Your own chairman at the time admitted that the Republican floor leader in the Senate blocked the bills from passage. So you have forfeited any right to squawk about how we cleaned up your mess. Now I want to comment on a few claims that have been made. You say there has been no participation by the minority side. This bill was negotiated at the staff level for 3\1/2\ weeks, 7 days a week, around the clock. Your staff was invited to every meeting. Some of them they did not come because they did not like the choices that were being made. But someone had to make the decisions, because you did not. So the staff negotiated virtually all of those compromises. When they could not reach agreement, then they brought the Members in. You had Senator Domenici on the Republican side and Mr. Visclosky going on and on about the Energy and Water bill, for instance. You had Rosa DeLauro in the ag bill involved, you had Mr. Dicks in the Interior bill involved as the appropriate subcommittee chairs. If you did not bring your subcommittee ranking members into the mix, that is your fault, not mine. All I know is, our people participated. If they did not on your side, it is either because they did not want to or because you did not invite them to. I do not know which is which. Do not blame us for your screw- ups. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, let me simply point out to the gentleman who just spoke that our committee took no action whatsoever on all of the items he just mentioned. They are all mandatory programs. All this resolution does is to carry forward the same limitations in those programs that you had in them last year.