Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I don't even understand what the gentleman is talking about.

Mr. OBEY. No, I did not. I took great umbrage at you interrupting me.

Mr. OBEY. I told you I would not yield.

Mr. OBEY. You don't like the answer.

Mr. OBEY. No, I would not. I told you I would not. You have got half- an-hour. I have 3 minutes. Why should I yield to you?

Mr. OBEY. No, I will not.

Mr. OBEY. ``Whatever you do for the least of your brothers, you do unto me.'' That is what someone who was fairly important in the history of the world told us a long time ago. But what has the Congress done for the least of our brothers and sisters? It is an indication of the values of those on the majority side of the aisle when they brag about the fact that they held the minimum wage increase hostage to their determination to give away $289 billion to the wealthiest 7,500 people in this country every year. Their deal was ``we ain't going to do nothing for the little people of this economy unless you first provide even more money in the pockets of the very wealthiest people in this country.'' I defy you to show me two farms in any congressional district in the country that would pay the estate tax under the alternative that the Democrats proposed. You may not remember what the numbers were, but I do.

Mr. OBEY. No. You have plenty of time.

Mr. OBEY. Regular order. If you are going to manage a bill, you need to understand the rules of this House.

Mr. OBEY. You can answer on your time. I am answering you on my time. You answer on your time. Now, I would appreciate no further interference from the gentleman. The gentleman wants to brag about the prescription drug proposal in the homeland security bill. The majority party nailed into that prescription drug bill last year a prohibition against the Federal Government negotiating for lower prices. So where did the seniors have to go? Wal-Mart finally announced they are going to provide lower drug prices. I suggested in the conference in the Homeland Security bill that we add language to that bill which says notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall enter into a contract immediately with Wal-Mart to negotiate on behalf of the United States Government with drug manufacturers and suppliers regarding prices to be charged for prescription drugs under Medicare Part D. It is a sorry day when the majority party stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the pharmaceutical industry against the recipients under Medicare Part D, labeled ``part dumb'' by a lot of the seniors in my district. And it is a sorry day, it is a sorry day, when we have to rely on Wal- Mart in order to do what the public representatives of this Congress ought to do, which is to allow our own government to negotiate for lower prices, rather than relying on this Rube Goldberg monument that makes people go to Canada in order to get some mercy in terms of drug prices. They want to freeze the minimum wage. They freeze the minimum wage. It doesn't surprise me. The minimum wage is frozen almost as cold as their hearts.

Mr. OBEY. Let me say to the gentleman, I am not angry at all to Wal- Mart for responding to a public need. I congratulate them for it. The shame is the fact that you and the majority folks in this House would not meet your responsibilities to have the government negotiate to save money for everybody.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot of talk on this House floor about values. I would suggest that how we spend our time reveals our values in many ways. This Republican-controlled Congress was able to take the time to debate the fate of horses. They were able to take the time to provide $290 billion in tax relief for 7,500 of the richest people in the country each year. They were able to take the time to provide new tax breaks for oil companies. But there was no time, apparently, for providing comprehensive health care reform, and there was certainly no time, apparently, to provide an increase in the minimum wage, which has been frozen for 9 years. The CEOs from your wealthiest corporations in this country earn more in 4 hours than a minimum wage worker earns in an entire year. And yet the Republican majority found the time to make life easier for the most well-off 1 percent of people in this country, but no time at all to help those who need it most. What kind of values does that represent?

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this rule will allow the House to pass the Department of Defense appropriation bill for the year; and, in addition, it will allow the Congress to move forward with a $70 billion partial payment on the cost of funding the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would much prefer that we would be paying for the entire year, rather than continuing to see this war financed on the installment plan. We are now reaching almost $500 billion that has been expended on this endeavor, and I think it would be helpful to the American people if they could see the full cost each year, rather than having it dribbed and drabbed out month by month in order to hide the full impact of the cost. This rule also allows the House to consider the continuing resolution for the remainder of the budget. We will, when the House leaves this week, have passed only two appropriation bills, the defense bill and the homeland security bill. That means the entire domestic portion of the budget plus the bills to finance foreign operations and State Department operations will be delayed until after the election, well into the fiscal year. Now, the majority leader in the Senate, Senator Frist, I note yesterday objected to the ``obstructive tactics'' of the Democratic minority on appropriation bills. I want to point out no one in this House is going to be able to point to a single instance in which the minority party has delayed consideration of any appropriation bill. In fact, we can point to at least 16 occasions on which the minority accelerated or helped to move forward the appropriation bills. That does not mean we always voted for them. We voted for some and against others. But I made the point at the beginning of the year that we were going to cooperate fully procedurally because at the end of the year I wanted people to understand that if these bills were not passed that the responsibility would lie with the majority party. And it has. Now the responsibility does not lie with the majority appropriators. The problem is that this House started out the year with the majority party leadership allowing the strong right wing of their caucus to dictate the content of the budget resolution, and that budget resolution was incredibly unrealistic. Now, as a result, we find the Senate counterparts of our friends on the majority side of the aisle who are reluctant to go on record endorsing many of the actions that were required by that budget resolution in the appropriations process. And so they prefer to push it past the election so that there will be no accountability for most of the actions taken by Congress on the domestic portion of the budget. There will be no final accountability with respect to the number of research grants that are cut from NIH below the base 3 years ago. There will be no accountability for the fact that No Child Left Behind education funds are short-sheeted by over $1 billion. There will be no accountability for thousands of other decisions made in the domestic budget, because all of those final decisions have been postponed until after the election when you can then bring bills up for a vote without having any political consequence. I think that is unfortunate, and I would simply say that this demonstrates what happens when the priority of the majority party is simply to deliver king-size tax cuts to persons making over a million bucks a year. The minority party throughout has tried to show that we could meet our responsibilities in education, in health care, in science, in agriculture, and in other areas by having a very modest cutback in the size of tax cuts that are aimed at those folks who are in the top 1 percent of earners in this country, in fact, even better than the top 1 percent, those who make $1 million or more a year. And I would venture to say that I think if you asked most of those people they would say ``We don't need a tax cut quite that large as long as you are taking care of the middle-class folks. Instead, use that money to meet these responsibilities.'' Unfortunately, the Congress has chosen not to do that. So, once again, we have to finance the entire domestic portion of the budget on a continuing resolution, hiding until after the election all the multiple decisions that I thought we were so eager to make when we ran for election 2 years ago.

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

Mr. OBEY. I thank my friend, and I would just like to point out, is it not true, however, that we were told by the intelligence community that even if Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, that they would most likely use them only if we attacked?

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman. Mr. Speaker, this bill represents the death of lobby reform. Over the last year, as we all know, this House has received a black eye because of the DeLay scandal, stories about lobbyists paying for golf trips to Scotland, the Cunningham blatant bribery case, the Abramoff scandal, and we have been awash in talk of reform. But comprehensive reform packages have not been allowed to come to this floor. We have not been allowed by the majority to have votes on them. But now, 7 weeks before the election, we get a chance to see that the majority has labored long and produced a mouse, or a fig leaf at best. My old friend, Archie the Cockroach, said once, ``The trouble with most people is that they lose their sense of proportion; of what use is it for a queen bee to fall in love with a bull?'' Think about it a minute. The problem with this bill is that there is a huge problem and this bill proposes a minuscule solution. The answer of the majority leadership is to require a list of what they call earmarks. But this package is more notable for what it does not include than it is for what it does include. I would call it the 1 percent solution. Now, my personal anger about earmarks I think is well known in this body. The last time I chaired the Appropriations Committee there was not a single earmark in the Labor-H appropriation bill. Today there are over 1,200. And 3 years ago the Labor-H Subcommittee used the earmarks as blackmail by threatening to cut off earmarks for any Member who refused to vote for an inadequate bill. I did not especially like that and I made that quite clear. But the point is that the problem is not earmarks. It is the abuse of the earmark process. This proposal does nothing to ensure institutional integrity. It is consumer fraud masquerading as earmark reform. Look at what it does not cover: It applies only to committee reported bills. It exempts managers' amendments. That means the famous ``Bridge to Nowhere'' would be exempted from this bill. On tax earmarks this bill actually makes the existing law worse. Right now a tax earmark is defined as a special treatment for 100 or fewer persons. This bill says the only time that it is going to be counted as a tax earmark is if it affects one entity. That means you can have a huge tax break for two multinational oil companies and it isn't even covered in this package. In the 1986 tax bill, there were 340 separate transition rules costing over $10 billion. There were special tax breaks for two Chrysler plants. This bill wouldn't cover it. The only way that that would be exposed under this bill is if there had only been one tax break for one of those Chrysler plants. The tax bill that passed last year that provided special treatment for ceiling fan imports or for U.S. horse and dog racing or Hollywood studios that produce the movies in the Gulf, all exempt under this bill. There were 190 special provisions in the Pension Protection Act of 2000, costing $180 million in taxpayers' money--virtually all of them would be exempt under this proposition. If you want to save taxpayers' dollars, rather than continuing this silly game of Trivial Pursuit, what you would do is to require that reconciliation bills can be used only to reduce the deficit rather than increase it as the majority party has cynically used the reconciliation process the last 4 years. This bill, indeed, is Trivial Pursuit. I don't care if you list the Members who sponsor earmarks. I put out press releases on every one of them. I attended a ceremony last week where we had a groundbreaking for an expansion of the Mel Laird Medical Center in my district. I got that earmark. I am proud of it, and I am proud to stand for it. The problem is what this package doesn't contain. This is a joke. It is a fraud. It plays Trivial Pursuit. It focuses on the minutiae instead of the big problems. That should not be surprising given the track record of the majority party in this House. But this House ought to be able to do better.

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

Mr. OBEY. I thank you. Will you tell me how this is going to apply to the defense appropriations bill that will be coming back to us this year from conference?

Mr. OBEY. So none of the earmarks presently in the bill will be required?

Mr. OBEY. So none of the Senate earmarks will be included; the Senate will continue to be anonymous?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time. I would simply point out under this provision, when the defense appropriations bill comes back from the Senate, not a single Senate earmark will be listed, and in the future only House earmarks will be listed. The Senate earmarks will not be listed. I would also point out that if you read the language of this resolution, it makes quite clear that the tax provisions covered by this bill are, in fact, fewer than under existing law and also that same fact applies to trade preferences. Trade bills are hard enough to pass now. So what happens is they slip in all kinds of special deals for special commodities in order to get 218 votes. This bill will not lay a glove on them, and for that matter, it will not lay a glove on a single appropriations earmark. It doesn't do anything to any earmark in the House or the Senate. This bill is a fraud.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I agree with the proposition that it makes no sense to allow tribes to establish gambling casinos in territories that have no relationship to the tribe. But, I am voting against this bill because I believe that people who disagree with me ought to have the right to offer an amendment--for example, those who want to limit Indian tribes' ability to establish off-reservation casinos but would make an exception if the effort is supported by local officials--county board, city council, mayor--or if it is approved by referendum. But, this bill is arrogantly presented in a take it or leave it fashion which would not allow amendments to accomplish that. Without amendments such as that, this bill is going nowhere. It is simply a cynical effort by the Committee Chairman and the House Republican leadership to pose for political holy pictures by pretending that they are doing something by pushing a bill that is going nowhere. Even though I am troubled by some provisions of the bill, I could vote for it after the House has had an opportunity to consider legitimate amendments to it. But, I will not accept something that is arbitrarily presented on a take it or leave it basis. One problem in dealing with this issue is that people on both sides of the question have abused the process. Some tribes have abused existing law and have established casinos in territory totally unrelated to their own territorial base and have attempted to run roughshod over local officials in the process. And, on the other side, the committee and the House leadership have abused the process by refusing to allow amendments to the bill. If this bill were the product of negotiations, I could even accept that. But, the committee has chosen to arbitrarily bring this take it or leave it proposal to the House floor and has not even had the courtesy to provide a committee report to explain and help analyze the bill.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I think especially in the closing days of the session, that Members ought to have an understanding of what is going on, even though this is martial law time. So I would ask if the gentleman would please explain to the House what this action would do.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, continuing under my reservation, could I ask the gentleman, has the administration given us any indication of where they are likely to take funds from in order to accomplish this?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, continuing under my reservation, I would hope that the administration would let the Congress know as quickly as possible where it is planning to take funds from, so that if the Congress has any concerns, we might express those concerns before we are facing a fait accompli.