Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, well, with all due respect, the issue before us tonight is not what happened to past appropriations bills. The issue is whether or not, since the gentleman has chosen to take on these particular earmarks, the issue is whether or not the earmark in question merits support or not. I recognize the gentleman is trying to do what Otto Passman when he ran the Foreign Aid Committee, which is to offer amendments for illustrative purposes, but the fact is, tonight the House is not going to be making judgments on whether there should or should not be earmarks. The House, under procedures tonight, is simply being asked to make a judgment about whether a specific earmark is meritorious or not, and I would hope that that is the basis upon which they would cast their votes.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I will repeat again, I think that congressional earmarking has gotten way out of hand, but having said that, I want to challenge the idea that somehow every project that is funded by an agency downtown is pure, and every project selected for funding by a Member of Congress is impure. I want to give you one example. A few years ago, when Mitch Daniels was still head of OMB, he put out his so-called pork list, and leading the list in an attempt to embarrass me was an attack on a wind sled which I had gotten for Ashland and Bayfield in my district on the shores of Lake Superior. That water is cold; 40 degrees in the summertime. And the OMB decided that they were going to try to trumpet this project and being an illegitimate use of taxpayer funds, so they described what was wrong with it in their OMB booklet. There was only one problem. They had the wrong wind sled, they had the wrong model, and they described it as being a pleasure craft. In fact, here is why I got the money for the wind sled in that budget: because the local sheriff called me and told me that he had seen a young boy drown in Lake Superior who went through the ice, and the old device which they had to try to rescue the boy simply did not work. So this boy's parents stood on the shore watching their son drown just 30 or 40 feet away and they could not reach him and neither could anybody else. So the sheriff asked me if I could please get enough funds to help them provide a decent rescue vehicle for that area, and I got the wind sled, and I am proud I did. And I think that I knew a whole lot more about the facts than the head of OMB sitting on high in his office who was simply trying to skewer a Congressman from the other party, not having the foggiest idea of why we got it or what it was for. Now, I certainly don't defend every earmark. I have attacked a number of them in my years in this Congress. But if you are going to go after an earmark, it would be useful if you knew enough about it to judge whether or not it is a decent use of taxpayers' money or not. And I can tell you that most of the attacks I have heard on this floor over the past 15 or 20 years have not measured up in terms of knowing what they were talking about. So I just wanted to tell that little story to illustrate that I agree with the gentleman from Idaho that all of the wisdom in government is not deposited in the agencies. And I would point out that in many instances what you have in an agency is some political appointee sitting down there deciding on project after project after project who is going to get the money, and it is not on the merits; it is on the basis of who has a connection and who has an angle. The only difference is, their process is a whole lot more invisible than the process is up on the Hill. We ought to have improvements in the process. And if we are in the majority and if I am chairman of the Appropriations Committee, I guarantee you there is going to be a lot more discipline than there is today. But having said that, I do not think it is fair to simply pick out these projects and then move to a generalization that somehow the executive branch is always more qualified to decide what ought to happen in each congressional district. If we aren't qualified to know at least as much about that as the anonymous bureaucrats downtown, then we indeed don't belong here.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, let me say that I think in general, within the spectacularly inadequate allocation provided the subcommittee, that Mr. Hobson and Mr. Visclosky have done a very credible job on this bill, and I especially appreciate the way Mr. Hobson has approached this bill on a bipartisan basis. Having said that, I would hope that Members would vote against the previous question on the rule. As Mr. Visclosky pointed out, for the 25 years since Jimmy Carter left office, this country has been in a listless drift as far as energy policy is concerned. Energy conservation, energy research programs, have been funded at woefully low levels in comparison to where they were during the high point of Jimmy Carter's presidency. The problem is that, after Carter left office, his successors, especially Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush, systematically shrank those budgets in real terms, and so today, we are paying the price in terms of scarce energy and high energy prices. We have some choices to make. The Congress has already determined this year, the majority party has, that it is important this year to provide $40 billion in supersized tax cuts to people who make over $1 million a year. In contrast, Mr. Visclosky would offer an amendment which would scale back the size of those tax cuts by 2\1/2\ percent and use that money instead to make greater investments totaling $1 billion more than the bill contains for flood control projects and especially for energy conservation and energy development programs. If we had done that over the past 25 years, if we had simply kept up with what Jimmy Carter had asked us to do while he was President, we would be in a far more secure place as a Nation tonight and we would have a far more stable pricing system for energy, and we would be much further along the way toward protecting Mother Earth from the ravages of global warming. So I would hope that the House would vote against the previous question so that we would have an opportunity to resurrect the Visclosky amendment. I do believe that it is important to ask the question: What is more valuable to the country's future, stronger levees in our communities, stronger flood control projects, an energy policy that puts us ahead of the curve rather than at the mercy of OPEC, or an even easier Easy Street for the most well-off people in this society? I think the choice is obvious.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I think it is important that we not personalize this issue. I do not like the fact that these gentlemen are evidently going to be knocking out funding for these important military projects. But I do think it is important to recognize that under the budget resolution which was imposed by the House Republican majority, and under the rule that was voted for by virtually every Republican today, they have that right. That is a parliamentary fact. So I disagree with the judgment being made by the gentleman. But in all fairness, I think that the responsibility for this debacle lies squarely at the feet of the Speaker and the majority leader and the majority party leadership, because they broke arms for 3 weeks to impose a budget resolution on this House which required the allocation to the subcommittee which wound up being $824 million below the amount proposed by the President. Because the majority party leadership decided that it was more important to provide $40 billion in tax cuts to people who make $1 million a year, because the majority party leadership decided that it was more important to provide over $60 billion in tax cuts to people in the top 1 percent of our population who make more than $400,000 a year, because the majority party leadership decided that those priorities were preferable to meeting our education needs, our health care needs, our military construction needs, and our science needs, then the Appropriations Committee is stuck with the dirty job of carrying out those mandates. And under the rule that was imposed by the Rules Committee, which is appointed on the majority side by the Speaker of this House, every last one of them, because that rule was voted on by that leadership ordered and dominated committee, that is the reason that these emotions are in order. And to avoid that, that is why I tried to offer the previous amendment which said: Look it, this is a phony accounting gimmick. Let us be honest about it and pay for it by scaling back those tax cuts for the most well off in this society by just a smidgeon. So I think, if we are going to start passing out responsibility, this is not the responsibility of Mr. Lewis, it is not the responsibility of the gentlemen who are going to be offering the points of order, although I think their judgment is defective, but it is, in fact, the responsibility of the majority party leadership of this House. And it illustrates that Mr. DeLay was absolutely right when he said a few months ago: ``This is what you get when you elect a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House of Representatives,'' because it means there are no checks and balances in the system. It means that we have no way on stopping the majority party from putting tax cuts for the very wealthy ahead of the needs of our military, ahead of the needs of our kids, ahead of the needs of our workers and our sick in this society. This day illustrates how screwed up the priorities are on that side of the aisle.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. OBEY. Doesn't this whole thing illustrate that there are some people here who are much more concerned about the technical niceties of the procedures of this House than they are on the human implications of what it is we do here?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, if this point of order is upheld, does that mean that the House would be placing a higher value on the ideological accounting contained in the budget resolution than they would be on meeting the critical military needs of the country?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, as I indicated earlier in the debate, 2 days ago, the Republican majority passed a budget resolution which imposed a stringent ceiling on total appropriations for the year. The effect of that was to squeeze more than $1 billion of badly needed money out of this bill. What the committee has tried to do in response is that the administration in this bill asked for about 307 military construction projects, items like barracks and the like, and the committee essentially took 20 of them and designated those as ``emergency spending'' and that freed up $507 million so that the committee could insert a number of projects which represented their highest priorities. That meant that the bill was effectively, if you are going to look at it in terms of budget accounting, $507 million above the amount allowed by the budget ceiling. That didn't even take into account the fact that the committee is proceeding on the assumption that a good number of additional fees which the White House wants to impose on veterans might, in fact, go into effect. I don't believe they will. We don't deal with that issue in this amendment, but we do deal with the first issue. What we are simply suggesting is that we recognize that these projects requested by the White House are necessary, but we believe that they ought to be paid for. So what we suggested in committee and what I am asking on the floor is that we simply limit the size of the tax cut which is scheduled to take place for people who make over $1 million, we are suggesting that we shrink that tax cut from $114,000 on average for a person who makes over $1 million, we are suggesting we shrink that by about $1,400. That is hardly going to lay a glove on the most wealthy people in this country, but it would enable this bill to proceed with honest accounting, meeting high-priority needs of the military at various bases throughout the country and the world. So, Mr. Chairman, it is very simple, if you think that we ought to proceed with the military construction priorities laid out by the administration, and if you think that we ought to pay for those, then you would support this amendment. If you do not, then you would oppose it. I would suggest this is a fiscally responsible way to meet critical military needs, and I would hope that the House would see fit to approve the amendment. Point of Order

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I was here when the Budget Act was passed. And the purpose of that Budget Act was to reconcile spending with taxes to try to reduce the deficit. So the purpose of the Budget Act is to try to see to it that appropriations, direct spending, and revenues all mesh in such a way as to reduce, to the greatest possible extent, the deficit. That means that if this House takes an action on the tax side that provides large tax cuts, and if that action then imposes on the Appropriations Committee the requirement for deep cuts, that means that the two are, in fact, integrally connected. It is hard for me to understand how a supposedly conservative party can take the position that we should proceed under the Budget Act to act in a way that pretends that what we do on the revenue side is irrelevant to what we do on the spending side. This amendment, in my view, is within the spirit of the original intention of the Budget Act. Unfortunately, I must concede that under the way this House is being run these days, and under the rule under which this bill was brought to the floor, I must concede the point of order.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, I did not vote to go to war in Iraq. Most of our friends on the other side of the aisle did, but after the Congress voted to send our troops to war, the troops did not ask, is this an emergency or is it regular order of business? They just went. They did their duty. Some of them have done it two and three and four times in Iraq. I do not know why they should be stuck in the middle of a family squabble within the Republican Party in the Congress, a squabble between people who put tax cuts for the most well-off people first versus the people who put budget accounting nicety first versus people who think that there are some economic and social needs faced by the families of those soldiers. What the committee tried to do is to cut it down the middle, hedge a little bit here, a little bit there. We do not like that on this side of the aisle. So we tried to substitute honest accounting, and the majority party insisted on knocking that amendment out on a point of order. So at this point, we have to choose between a faulty accounting system or meeting the needs of the families of people who are in Iraq defending the national interests of this country; and while I have great misgivings about the advisability of having gone to war in the first place, I will be doggoned if I am going to stand here and allow somebody else's squabble about whether a budget item is an emergency or not get in the way of providing the school needs, the barracks needs and the other needs of the families in the military, who are not asking questions of their government; they are just doing their duty. So I congratulate the gentleman for his comments, and I think that this day, I was going to say it is a sad day in the history of the Congress, but it is not because this finally illustrates what we have been trying to demonstrate for 3 years, that what you do on the tax side of the budget, what you give to Mr. Raymond and his friends, is directly related to what you have left on the table that you can give our military families, our school kids and people in this country who need a little help on the health care front. It is about time that people on the majority side of the aisle recognized that connection.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman, but I think I have said enough. I just would hope that this House would reconsider what they have done this week and use this incident to recognize that that budget resolution is simply insufficient to meet the needs of our military, the needs of our school children and a number of other seriously competing needs. I would hope, and in fact I fully expect, that the Senate will not pass the budget resolution that has caused this problem. The irony is that the Republican majority in this House had to pass a let-us-pretend resolution yesterday, which said we are going to move ahead with appropriation bills on the assumption that the full Congress had passed the budget resolution, which it has not done, because Republican moderates in the Senate recognize that the budget resolution that is being enforced on the majority side in this House is too extreme for their taste in the Senate. Senators such as Senator Specter have already made that quite clear. So it is ironic that a budget that hasn't even passed the Congress is being used to enforce these kinds of trade-offs. I don't think the American people are going to be very pleased. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentlewoman. I am sorry the gentleman wouldn't yield to me, but if he had, I would have asked them this question: He said ``we'' are engaging in sleight of hand. I just wanted to ask him who that ``we'' was. Because this report was put together by his own party. It was brought to the House floor by his own party. We on this side of the aisle tried to correct that faulty accounting and we were not allowed to do that by the majority party either. So I just want to make certain that people understand that in this case the ``we'' is ``thee.''

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. I am somewhat amused by the fact that the last two times Mr. Edwards has tried to fully explain to the House what the impact of the point of order was that those who are responsible for the points of order tried to urge the Chair to cut off Mr. Edwards so that he could not, in fact, explain it. Let me simply say if I were offering these points of order, I would want to have as little discussion about them as possible also. I would not want to have them fully aired either. Let me just make the point. I find it interesting that we have Members of this House objecting on bookkeeping fine points to what the committee has been trying to do to provide these facilities and services to our military, and they stand in high dudgeon about the fact that the budget resolution is being exceeded. Yet I do not recall them objecting when the President has submitted to the Congress almost $400 billion in expenditures for Iraq, none of which has been submitted in the regular appropriations order. All of those requests have come in the form of supplemental appropriations, off budget, if you will. So I find it interesting that we can fight an entire war, spend $400 billion in an off budget, hide-the-cost-from-the-public fashion, and yet when it comes to meeting these small construction needs, and as the gentleman points out, this is not in the United States, this is in the Middle East itself. My understanding is that one of the items affects the special ops unit, and yet the gentlemen feel that their ideological commitment to their precious budget resolution, which they cannot even sell to their compatriots in the United States Senate, ought to be the be all and end all above every other economic or social or moral consideration. I find that, indeed, very interesting and very revealing. Parliamentary Inquiries

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, as I was sitting here, it struck me that the gentleman from Texas resembles a poor imitation of Vice President Cheney because, like Vice President Cheney, he is shooting at the wrong target. The first rule of thumb is that if you are going to shoot somebody or something, you make sure you are shooting the right person. What the gentleman just said to us is almost unbelievable. I mean, it sounded to me like I was in a sophomore high school class rather than in the House of Representatives, which is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world. We are told that because he was peaked about a hydroponic tomato project in a bill last year that somehow he was determined to take it out on the military by yanking out military construction projects that were asked for not by me, not by Mr. Walsh or anyone else, but by the President of the United States. I do not have any projects in this bill. I have a district that has very little to do with military except with respect to the Guard, and almost all of them are stuck in Iraq. So I can speak objectively with respect to projects. But it does seem quaint to me that if the gentleman did not like something that happened in another bill in another year in the deep, dark, distant past that instead he is going to shoot the future by yanking out money that the President of the United States thought it was important enough to ask for. I think that says something about the judgment of the persons making these motions today.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I will only take 1 minute. I just want to respond to something the distinguished majority leader said. He indicated that what had occurred on the House floor today was a process fight. That is not what it was at all. It was a priorities fight. We saw this unraveling today because the majority party insisted on sticking by a budget resolution which puts super-sized tax cuts for the most comfortable in this society ahead of every other consideration. We may not see arguments quite as dramatic and as chaotic as we did today on this bill, but as appropriation bills move through this House, we will see similar conflicting priorities, because the budget which has caused the problem is a budget which does not put the needs of military families first, it does not put the needs of education first, it does not put the need to invest in critical programs that strengthen the economy of the country in the future first. Instead, it continues to insist that we provide over $40 billion in tax cuts to persons who make over $1 million a year. That is a priorities fight. It is not a technical process fight. I think we need to keep that in mind.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this morning, I am not even going to talk about the fact that on this side of the aisle we feel that this bill is short by at least $1.8 billion in providing the kind of health and medical care that we think ought to be provided for our veterans. But I want to talk about two other problems in the bill. Because this bill, first of all, continues the fiction that somehow it is likely, or desirable, that $735 million in additional fees will be laid onto our retired military. I do not believe that that should happen, and I do not believe that will happen. And if it doesn't, then this bill has a $735 million hole that it is going to have to fill. Secondly, this bill has a very interesting budget gimmick that essentially allows this bill to come to the floor $500 million above the budget resolution that was adopted just 2 nights ago by the Republican majority. Here is what happened. The administration sent down in the military construction bill their request to move ahead with about 310 military infrastructure projects. What the committee did was to designate 20 of those projects, and there is nothing emergency about those projects, but they need to proceed. What the committee did was essentially to take 20 of those projects and simply label the expenditures for those projects as being emergency. Why did they do that? Because it then made room in the bill for the committee to add projects of their own totaling $507 million. So that is a $507 million gimmick which allows this bill to come to the floor in reality $507 million above the Republican budget resolution. As a result of the rule which is now being brought to the floor, there will be several choices that people will have to make. Members will now be free to strike the emergency designation for those projects. If they do, then the bill has to be taken off the floor because it exceeds the budget cap, unless the committee itself moves to simply take all of those projects out of the bill. As a result, if those projects are taken out of the bill, we then have a hole in the administration request. If they aren't taken out of the bill, then we, in effect, are $507 million above the budget that the Republicans pledged their loyalty to just 2 days ago. And in addition to that, down the line you are still going to have to find $735 million to make up for the fiction that there is some possibility in this place that those additional fees ought to be laid on our retired military. I think this is another quaint example of the majority party fealty to their own budget resolution and we are forced to encounter these ridiculous budgetary gimmicks because the majority party refused to fix the problem. I offered an amendment in committee to try to fix the problem, at least to fix the problem of the $507 million. I simply suggested that we support an amendment which would cut the size of the tax cut for people making a million dollars, and they are going to get a $114,000 tax cut this year. We simply suggested that if you can cut the size of that $114,000 tax cut by 1,400 bucks, you could pay on the square, without any gimmicks, for that $507 million. That is what we should have done. But the majority party thought that it was more important to deliver a $114,000 tax cut to millionaires than it was to play straight with the budget process and to play straight with their own budget resolution and to play straight with the American people. Very interesting. Very interesting.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I reluctantly must concede the point of order. I would have preferred that the gentleman had not made the point of order, but given the fact he has done it, the rule under which this bill is being debated precludes the inclusion of this amendment. I very much regret that.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I don't intend to object, but I do want to point out to each and every Member that if this unanimous consent agreement is accepted by the body, the way I count it, that means that we will go to about 12 o'clock tonight before we begin to vote. I ask that Members remember that as they are entertaining their enthusiasm for offering a number of these amendments tonight. It just seems to me that Members need to know that this is going to take a long, long time; and we would appreciate it being shortened by people whenever it is possible to do so. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentleman for the time. Mr. Speaker, today, the House of Representatives enters the land of make believe. Since April, the majority party has been trying to pass its misbegotten budget resolution, and they have had a very difficult time doing that because their more moderate Republican brethren in the Senate have regarded the budget pushed by the majority party as being extreme, and it is something that they don't want to take home to their constituents. Last night, in a very interesting kabuki dance, the majority party managed to finally find the votes some more than a month late to pass their budget resolution in this House. But it still has not been passed by the Senate, and I think objective observers feel it is not likely to ever pass the Senate. So now we have a problem. The appropriations bills are not supposed to move forward until we have a budget resolution passed by both chambers in place. So what do our friends on the majority side of the aisle decide to do? They use this rule to deem as passed the budget resolution which they have not been able to pass. In other words, the rule says ``Let us pretend that in spite of the fact that the Congress hasn't passed its budget, it has.'' That is what we are doing. And so I think that is reason enough to vote against this bill and this rule. Unless, of course, you think it is right to provide $40 billion in tax cuts to people who make over $1 million a year, while at the same time we are cutting needed domestic programs such as education, health care, science, and environmental protection by $13 billion below the current service level. Unless you think, of course, that it is perfectly justifiable to cut the clean water revolving fund by 50 percent, as this bill will do, at the same time that you are giving the wealthiest 1 percent of people in this country who make over $400,000 a year $64 billion in tax cuts. The average person making over $1 million a year will get a tax cut well over $100,000. If you make $42,000 a year, the tax break that you are going to get in the bill that the majority passed last week is about 80 cents a week; but if you make over $1 million, your tax cut is going to be as large as the entire salary of that person who made $42,000. I don't think that is the kind of budget that I want to take home to my constituents. So I would say the underlying bill itself is bad enough with what it does to the clean water revolving fund, the way it shreds land acquisition programs, the way it hems in EPA's ability to enforce the law against polluters, it is bad enough to vote against as is. But when you add to it this ``Let's Pretend'' fiction that the House has passed a budget which it hasn't passed, it therefore becomes an endorsement of that budget. I don't think the American people want that budget. I certainly don't want that budget. I intend to vote ``no.''

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, I knew we still had charter members of the Flat Earth Society walking around this country. I didn't realize there were quite so many in the United States Congress.