Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds. Mr. Chairman, I agree with the gentleman. That is what I meant when I said that the way this House is being run these days, the people who know the least about these things are evidently being given the opportunity to do the most about them, which is backwards in terms of my understanding of the legislative body. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman, what is happening on this floor tonight is blatant, obvious, raw politics. That is all it is. The Republican majority leadership is bringing a bill to the floor which has over $10 billion in aid to various areas of the country. No offsets. No offsets at all. But when on this side of the aisle we are trying to deal with disaster problems for farmers on an equal footing with the hurricane disasters that we have just had in Florida and other States, then we are told, Oh, no. All of a sudden a new rule has to apply. I would say to the gentleman from Nebraska that is like saying that in an Oklahoma-Nebraska football game, Oklahoma has to go 200 yards for a touchdown while Nebraska only has to go 100 yards. It just is not fair. It is not square. I would make another point. Even if we were going to have offsets, this is a ``let's pretend'' offset. This is a phony offset, because if we take a look at the scoring by the beloved Congressional Budget Office, which the majority party used to stick with, come hell or high water, if we take a look at this, there is no offset whatsoever in the first fiscal year, zero savings by this ``let's pretend'' offset. In the second year there is a $56 million savings out of a $2.8 billion cost. Who are they kidding? This is a political maneuver. This is not a financial or budgetary offset. It is a joke. And if it did not do so much damage to farmers, I would laugh at it. Over 3 years, it provides only one-tenth the offset that is required to meet the standard budget rules around here. What we have got here tonight is not an offset, it is a political shell game, and the problem is that shell game results in sticking it to farmers. Shame on you. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would simply like to point out some of the budget reductions which will be caused by this amendment: The National Institutes of Health would be cut by $884 million from the House-passed bill. The Centers For Disease Control, who told us yesterday we have a crisis on our hands with respect to childhood influenza, this amendment would cut $136 million from the House-passed bill for that agency. Head Start, this amendment would cut $214 million, $10 million below last year's level. The Low Income Heating Assistance Program, LIHEAP, would be cut $62 million from the House level. The Federal Aviation Administration, they would be funded nearly one- half billion dollars below the fiscal 2004 level. Education would be cut by $1.8 billion below the House-passed labor- health bill. No Child Left Behind would be cut by $440 million. The vice president last night in the debate talked about the importance of that program. Title I grants would be cut by $414 million. Special education, which both political parties posed for holy political pictures on for the last 4 years, that program is being cut by $400 million. Pell Grants, the President at the national convention talked about the need to expand Pell Grants. This would cut Pell Grants, would exacerbate the shortfall by $300 million. The FBI would be cut $161 million, including personnel resources for the Office of Intelligence and counterterrorism field investigations. NASA would be cut. National parks would be cut by $70 million, meaning a layoff of some 800 park rangers and maintenance staff. Nuclear nonproliferation programs, which both presidential candidates said last week were their number one concern, would be cut by $40 million. Law enforcement assistance would be cut by $81 million. This is a family-friendly amendment? Give me a break. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I think, as the gentleman has so aptly indicated already, the best way that this bill can be described is to put it in the terms that the old Bowery Boys used to say in those B movies many years ago when we were both kids, when Leo Gorcey would say ``dis don't do nuthin' to nobody.'' That is exactly what this legislation does. It ``don't do nuthin' to nobody.'' It is here simply because, evidently, the folks who are on the Committee on the Budget do not, as the gentleman from Florida indicates, understand how the OMB goes about dealing with or enforcing and implementing the continuing resolutions which we pass. Somehow, it seems that the Committee on the Budget or perhaps only the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, I do not know, it seems that they feel that, without this language, OMB will go on a spending spree. Well, the fact is that what this legislation says is that OMB cannot do something which OMB is already not planning to do. The interpretation that is always given to the continuing resolution by the Committee on Appropriations and by OMB is that the most conservative approach must be used for obligating funds under a CR. Notwithstanding that interpretation, the Committee on the Budget is having its version of a heart attack, suggesting that somehow the continuing resolution, which the gentleman brought to the floor last week, is going to result in runaway spending. As the gentleman from Florida says, while it pretends to reign in OMB, this resolution will not result in one dime less being spent than would have been the case with the CR that passed the House last week. I guess all I would say is that I find it interesting that 2 weeks before the end of the fiscal year, when this Congress has still not passed a single domestic appropriations bill, because the bills that were passed in this body have not been accepted by those in the other body, and at a time when we still do not have a transportation bill out of the authorizing committee, at a time when so many pieces of legislation are tied up between the House and the Senate, this House has been asked to waste a good amount of time on the budget process reform bill, which the Committee on the Budget insisted on bringing to the floor earlier in the year, which did a ``brilliant'' job of passing so-called budget reform legislation which guaranteed that Members could continue to do anything whatsoever that they wanted to do on the tax side of the ledger without having to take into account one iota what it did to the deficit. Now we are being asked to pass this meaningless piece of fluff. It does not matter whether Members vote ``yes'' or ``no'' on this resolution. The result will be the same. So I guess if it makes the chairman of the Committee on the Budget happy, the House may as well go ahead and pass it, but do not deceive yourself into thinking that it does something for or to anybody. It does not. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 6\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 8 minutes. Mr. Speaker, the basic job of Congress is to pass the annual budget and appropriation bills in order to keep the government running and to fund the most important functions of government. To do that under our processes, we are first supposed to pass a budget resolution which sets the outline for spending for the coming year, and then we are supposed to follow that on by passing 13 appropriation bills which fill in the blanks in detail. This continuing resolution is here because, on the domestic side of the budget, none of that has happened. We have passed only one of the 13 appropriation bills that were supposed to pass by the end of the fiscal year. That is for the Department of Defense. But even other national security bills have not been passed, and certainly, nothing has been passed that meets our obligations on the domestic side of the ledger. The majority party controls this body by a very narrow margin. Ordinarily, if this institution were being run in a rational way, that would mean that the majority leadership would try to reach out, broaden its base of support for basic legislation by making an occasional compromise here and there so that we can broaden the number of people who are willing to support whatever products they bring to the floor. That has not happened either. When I chaired this committee, we had a bipartisan allocation between the 13 subcommittees. Both parties agreed on how much should go into each of those 13 appropriation bills. That is why we were able that year to finish every single appropriation bill by the end of the fiscal year. The minority has not been afforded that opportunity this year because the majority leadership has been held captive by the most extreme members of the majority party caucus. As a result, they have produced highly ideological appropriation bills which have provided little incentive for other members of their own party to support those bills. The domestic appropriations have been so stingy in the area of education, in the area of health care, in the area of veterans' health, in the area of law enforcement, and in the area of transportation that their Republican counterparts in the Senate have not wanted to pass those bills. If we take a look at the appropriation bills that have passed the Senate, those bills contain about $7 billion more on the domestic side of the ledger than the appropriation bills in this House. We could probably have reached bipartisan agreement if that $7 billion had been made available here. But oh, no, it was so necessary for the majority party to preserve every single dollar to provide $128,000 tax cuts for people who make a million bucks a year that they were not willing to provide additional funding in the area of health and education and the like. So now we have what I call a duck-and-run approach to governance. The majority party does not want a vote on the level of veterans' health care funding, so the veterans' appropriation bill is not even coming to the floor. And the majority party is avoiding having to choose between the wishes on the Senate side and the wishes on the House side by simply going to a continuing resolution which ducks all of these questions until after the election. This strategy is being followed either by design or as the result of sheer incompetence, and I am not sure which. I want to make it clear, as did the minority whip, that that does not apply to the gentleman who chairs the committee. He got every single bill out of his committee on time and passed them out of the House except for VA/HUD, and even though they were extremely short on necessary funding, on the minority side, we indicated that even though we strenuously objected to the stringent limitation of funding in a number of areas, we still procedurally cooperated with the majority party to toss those bills over to the Senate in the hopes that rationality would prevail and we would wind up with a product that could be supported when those bills came by the conference. But at this point, I guess the bill that passed the House last week is a perfect metaphor for this session, because there was an internal triangular fight within the majority party in this House on that transportation bill, and, as a result, we passed a transportation bill that had been stripped of aid to states for highways, it had been stripped of the mass transit programs, it had been stripped of the funding for airport construction and development. So the only thing left in the transportation bill was the title of the bill. If you take a look at other legislation, national parks, the President made a promise when he campaigned 4 years ago that he would send down a 5-year plan to attack the maintenance backlog in our national parks. Well, it is 4 years later, folks, and what has happened? The President and this Congress have provided only 12 percent of the funding needed to meet those backlog needs. As the gentleman from Maryland indicated, we have done nothing to deal with the problems of 45 million Americans who have no health insurance. We have done nothing to expand Pell grants, even though the President in his spectacularly disingenuous performance at the Republican Convention told the world that we needed more money for Pell grants, even though his administration has blocked the increase in Pell grants for the last 2 years. So, Mr. Speaker, the fact that this continuing resolution is here today is a monument to ideological zealotry. It is also a monument to institutional failure. This Congress is failing to meet even the most basic and minimal expectations that the country has for it by way of doing our routine business. This is governing in a pitiful way, and I wish that I could say something more positive about it, but, indeed, I cannot. We have no choice but to vote for this resolution in order to keep the government functioning, but this is a pitiful way to run a railroad or a legislative body. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

Mr. OBEY. For the moment I am, yes.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, if Members oppose this motion to recommit, they will deny 28,165 renovated homes for military families throughout the military housing privatization initiative. If they oppose this motion to recommit, they will deny many of America's veterans access to VA health care, which ought to be their right. This motion would provide an additional $2.5 billion above the President's request to help cut waiting lists, renovate crumbling VA facilities and ensure timely quality health care for America's veterans. The FBI is the Nation's lead agency for domestic counterterrorism, yet it is the only component of our national security apparatus that will not have its funding for fiscal year 2005 in place. The motion would ensure that the FBI gets its funding now, not later. Failure to pass this motion to recommit would also shut down the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the Terrorist Screening Center. Neither received funding in last year's spending bill, so neither would have their funding extended by the continuing resolution without this motion. The motion to recommit, Mr. Speaker, would also eliminate the nearly $1 billion in special student loan subsidies being paid to lenders that instead could be put to better use by helping students and families afford a college education. This House passed that amendment earlier this month on the Labor-HHS bill in the form of the Kildee amendment. Also, Mr. Speaker, failure to pass this motion to recommit would deny health insurance to 750,000 children who could be covered under the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP. Currently $1.1 billion of SCHIP funds are available to States to provide health insurance to children. These funds were accumulated while the SCHIP programs were just being organized, but current law requires that these funds be returned to the Treasury if they are not used by October 1. With more than 8 million children lacking health coverage, it makes sense to give States more time to use these funds and enroll children in the SCHIP programs. We ought not be robbing these funds from children's health insurance programs because of an arbitrary deadline. We also by this motion would provide additional funding for education and health care programs funded by the Labor-HHS-Education bill. We ask that in each case in the education and health area that this bill be adjusted to reflect the higher of the numbers between the House and the Senate bill. The result of that, for instance, would be to add $367 million to NIH to maintain momentum in research on diseases like cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, et cetera. We also would try to deal with the section 7 small business loan program that was dealt with by this House on a similar motion several weeks ago. Mr. Speaker, I would urge support for the motion to recommit.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask the gentleman from Oklahoma a question. We have had five or six amendments adopted, the Van Hollen amendment, the Davis amendment on Cuba, the Lee amendment on Cuba, the Waters amendment on Cuba, the Stenholm amendment on debt ceiling and, I believe, one other. Last year, we had the experience of seeing a good many amendments which had been adopted on this floor to this and several other bills evaporate as soon as they went to conference. I would like to know whether the gentleman can assure us that he will insist on retaining each of these amendments and will not bring this bill back from conference if these amendments do not stay in the conference this year.

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

Mr. OBEY. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his candor. Let me say this, Mr. Chairman, I had originally been willing to support this bill as it came out of committee, even though many of us on this side of the aisle thought the bill woefully inadequate in terms of funding levels for various transportation accounts. But the majority has been in a three-cornered feud with itself. The authorizing committee and a number of others in the majority party caucus, for different reasons, have shredded this bill. They have knocked out, at this point, highway aid to the States. They have knocked out mass transit. They have knocked out funding for airport construction. They have knocked out 80 percent of the Department of Transportation funds that originally were contained in this bill. In addition to that, we have received no assurance whatsoever that the amendments that the House adopted would be retained in conference. In fact, we have essentially been told, because of the presidential threat of a veto, that these amendments will once again be stripped in the conference. That means that virtually all of the action that occurred on this floor has been meaningless with respect to the items that were debated today and late last night. I am certainly willing to meet my responsibilities to help move bills forward, even if I do not always agree with their content, provided the majority party itself takes its duty seriously. But if the majority party itself, if the majority party leadership itself will not defend their own legislative product as it comes out of the committee, I certainly do not see why I should, especially when House actions, given the arbitrary action of the authorizing committee, have turned this bill into a cadaver. So, at this point, I intend to vote ``no,'' because I am not going to vote for a bill which effectively cuts more than half the dollar resources out of this bill and which effectively cuts 80 percent of the transportation funding out of the bill just because some people in this House happen to think that committee jurisdiction is more important than being responsible.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and let me simply say that I am not only concerned with the Cuba provisions, I am very much concerned with the transportation items. And I am not about to go on record voting for a bill which has cut these bills, in essence, almost 80 percent below last year's level in terms of transportation items. I have seen the majority party's campaign committee play games with that too often, and I do not expect to see ads run against Members of the Congress because they voted for a product which the majority party itself is asking them to vote for. That has happened too many times for me to be suckered by that one.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would just observe the gentleman said this is a good bill. There is not anything left of this bill except the enacting clause; that is in great shape. Outside of that, it is a hollow shell.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

Mr. OBEY. In its present form, I certainly am.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, last week during consideration of this bill, three factions of the majority party took turns in striking entire accounts out of this bill. More than half the budgetary resources that had been in the bill are now missing. More than 80 percent of the Department of Transportation's resources have been deleted from this bill. This bill is now missing more than $41 billion in funding that was supposed to flow to each of our States for highways, transit and aviation. My motion to recommit the Department of Transportation programs and provides adequate funding for addressing the Nation's transportation needs. This motion asks that the Committee on Appropriations restore the accounts that were deleted by points of order, and it calls for increased funding above the committee-reported levels for highways, transit, new start projects, Amtrak and Grants-in-Aid for airports. It restores funding for rural airports through the Essential Air Service Program, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Surface Transportation Board. The motion is important because without it we are simply not meeting some of the crucial transportation needs of the country. Mr. Speaker, I am sure that my friend from Oklahoma will say that because of the form of this motion that this bill will effectively be delayed or killed. The fact is, that is not correct. This bill is already dead. This bill is already on the way to the morgue. It quit breathing last Friday. All I am trying to do is to resuscitate the bill and make it something other than a cadaver. So, without this motion, this House is acquiescing in the fact that jurisdictional arguments between committees have resulted in a bill which has little more than the enacting title, and I do not think that it does very much credit to the House. If you vote for this amendment, you will be voting to resuscitate the programs that were knocked out because of the willfulness of the authorizing committee last week, and I would urge a ``yes'' vote for the proposition.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. All of that can be solved by simply having the Committee on Rules this time do its duty and report out a rule that protects a rational bill.