Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

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. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I am confused. I thought that the rules of this House required Members to address the contents of the amendment under discussion. Now, the purpose of this amendment, as I understand it, is to allow families to be reunited more than once every 3 years, and yet we have heard a number of voices on the Republican side of the aisle address a very different question. I must assume that they have not read the amendment; and for any of them for whom it would help, I would be happy to read the amendment again. But based on the comments that I have heard, for instance, from the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), according to the gospel by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), we are supposed to oppose this amendment because Castro is a bad fellow. Well, I find it interesting that because of our dislike for Fidel Castro, who will either eventually die or fall of his own weight, because of our dislike of Mr. Castro, this Congress is being told that we are supposed to say to a person living in the United States who wants to visit his wife or his daughter or his brother, sorry, but because we do not like Castro, we are going to take it out on you and we are not going to allow your family to see each other more than once every 3 years. Now, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) may think that is consistent with family values. Some of the other majority Members of this House may think that is consistent with family values. I think that is a gross perversion of politics. We are letting our political dislike for Mr. Castro impact negatively the family yearnings of individual Americans and Cubans. To me, that is a fundamentally immoral position for our government to take, and I just have to again ask Members, before they get up on this floor on this amendment and bloviate about how much they dislike Mr. Castro, I would simply suggest they read the amendment and ask whether or not they think it is morally justified, because they dislike Mr. Castro so much, to take their dislike out on the victims of Castro, which are the families who are split up and who, unless this amendment is passed, will continue to be in a position where the politicians in Washington decide that they know better than individual family members who do not give a rip about politics and are simply trying to figure out ways to see their loved ones. This is an incredibly disgraceful performance.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I am sure they care about politics, but I am sure they do not care for the fact that some Members of this House seem to care more about politics than they do those Cuban families.

Mr. OBEY. With all due respect, I was not referring to myself. I was referring to you.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, the issue is very simple. When someone who lives in Florida wants to go to his wife's funeral or visit a family Member who is deathly sick, the question is whose judgment should prevail, the judgment of that individual constituent or the judgment of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Lincoln Diaz-Balart). I think the answer is clear.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I intend to vote against the previous question on the rule. I intend to vote against the rule. And if the House does what I think it is going to do on this bill in the next 2 days, I intend to vote against the bill as well. The gentleman from New York (Mr. Reynolds) indicates that the Committee on Appropriations has done its job. That is correct. But what is happening now, the Committee on Appropriations is trying even though we are at the end of the fiscal year and even though many of the programs that we are supposed to appropriate money for have not yet been authorized because of failure of the authorization process, the Committee on Appropriations is going to see its product shredded because of the inability of the authorizing committee and the White House and the majority leadership in both the Senate and the House to get together on a reasonable compromise, which hopefully would also include Members of the minority. And so now what is happening is that a rule is being produced which is theoretically an open rule, but which in reality will result in about 80 percent of this bill being shredded. The carcass of this bill will then go to conference, and in conference the Committee on Appropriations will be asked to reconstruct the legislation which will have been shredded on the House floor. No individual member will have any input into what the final product that comes out of conference will be. The reason we have a Committee on Rules is to avoid this kind of chaos. The reason we have a Committee on Rules is to bring adult supervision to the House floor from time to time, and the fact is that the Committee on Rules is being derelict in its duty and the House leadership is being derelict in its duty when it does not step in to resolve what Dick Bolling used to call these dung hill fights between different committees. Dick Bolling used to bemoan the fact that Members of this House seemed to think that they had a greater obligation to their committee than they do to the House as a whole. They do not. At least they should not. We were not elected to be members of the Committee on Appropriations or members of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure or members of the Committee on Rules. We were elected to be Members of the House of Representatives, and it is our job to sometimes defend the House against the arbitrary actions of individual committees. And when the Committee on Rules does not step in to guarantee that, then the result is chaos. That is what we are going to see here today. We are going to have three different factions of the majority party each trying to impose its own will by taking advantage of the fact that the Committee on Rules did not do its job. So in protest, I mean, we only have about 2 weeks before the end of the fiscal year. We only have passed one appropriations bill. And in my view it is this lack of leadership which has resulted in this miserable record of performance or rather miserable record of nonperformance on the part of the House of Representatives on appropriations issues. The Committee on Appropriations on both sides of the aisle has worked and worked and worked to try to overcome an inability to perform on the part of other committees, and yet the product that the committee has tried to produce is going to be shredded today because the leadership did not pull people in and knock their heads together to get them to act like adults. That is nothing new around here, but I wish to God it would not be routine.

Mr. OBEY. I found the gentleman's response interesting, Mr. Speaker. He starts to talk about taxes. This bill and my position on it has nothing whatsoever to do with taxes. It has everything to do with the fact that the leadership on your side of the aisle will not meet their responsibility in choosing which individual Members they are going to discipline in order to bring a coherent piece of legislation to the floor. This has nothing to do with tax levels.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, that is absolutely correct. The majority knows it but they try to hide it at every opportunity because they do not have the guts to take the issue on directly.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, that is also absolutely correct.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I would like to make a couple of observations, in a sense give a progress report on what has happened on this bill so far, given what the Rules Committee did in exposing this bill to these points of order. There are a lot of things that have happened to this bill so far, but I would like to simply talk about the values that have led the House at this point to strike certain programs from the bill, while not striking others. As I understand the actions that have been taken so far by points of order raised by Members of the majority, as I understand it, we have so far eliminated formula highway grants to the States; we have done serious damage to the essential airline service for small rural airports; we have done significant damage to FAA grants for airports, all of which will impact States' and localities' ability to develop their economies. But let me describe something that has not been eliminated from this bill. This bill still contains--and it is interesting that this provision was not stricken by any of those who lodged their motions--this bill contains a provision that extends government-offered reduced rate insurance for airlines operating in the domestic United States. Premiums are set under that program at no more than twice what commercial rates were 3 years ago. This means that airlines only pay about one-fifth what they would pay if they were forced to obtain their insurance from the private sector. My understanding is that this year airlines will pay about $150 million for government-subsidized risk insurance as opposed to $700 million they would have to pay on the open market. So, once again, we are keeping a let-us-pretend industry afloat, an industry which for all practical purposes is bankrupt. All you have to do is watch what has happened with USAir, I do not know how many times USAir, Continental will go bankrupt before they are bankrupt; but all you have to do is watch that to understand that if you are big enough in this society, you have a safety net created which holds you up no matter how many times you tend to fall. But we do not provide that same kind of safety net to average workers in this country. What it demonstrates, for instance, is that the Federal Government is now willing to provide this huge subsidy in order to provide insurance to big airline corporations around the world or around the country, at the same time that this Congress continuously refuses to provide health insurance for 45 million Americans. I find that distinction interesting. I do not find it surprising, given the values of this Congress that I have come to expect, unfortunately; but it does say something about our national priorities. If we are willing to exempt from our parliamentary purity our concern about language in this bill when it affects some of the big industries in the country, but we are not willing to skip over it when it comes to inconveniencing and damaging State economies and the transportation ability of small units of government, I find it especially interesting that while the Congress continues to deny actions that would provide health insurance for the 45 million Americans who do not have it, and every time we talk about doing that work we are being for socialized medicine; yet we are willing to socialize risk when it comes to insurance costs for the airline industry. That is a great set of values, isn't it?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I would like to note my agreement with the comments of the distinguished gentleman from Florida. Even before this bill came to the floor, we were faced with the prospect of having a miserable record in producing appropriation bills and finishing them before the end of the fiscal year before we go home to face our constituents in the new elections. The House has passed all but, I believe, two appropriation bills, this one and the VA-HUD bill. And many of the bills that have passed have, I think, been in pitiful shape, but at least they have passed. None of them, except Defense, has been signed into law. This bill was at least on track to pass in inadequate though meaningful form before we leave here for the election, but now, as the gentleman from Florida has said, we are facing an even bleaker situation. We are going to leave here in October with even less of the people's business done than would have been the case if this debacle had not occurred on the floor today. What has happened is essentially this: The transportation authorizing committee, the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, or the No Transportation, No Infrastructure Committee, as it probably ought to be called, their basic highway authorization, for instance, expired 9 months ago. They have not yet been able to renew that basic legislation. The reason for that is that they have a three-corner debate going with themselves. There is a debate between the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure members in the House, those in the Senate, and the wizards in the White House Budget Office, and none of them want to give. So, as a result, what do we have here? The authorizing committee has not been able to get its job done, so the Committee on Appropriations has tried to at least keep these programs afloat while we continue to go through this Little League debate between the White House and the authorizers. But in fact now I guess the situation is that if the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure cannot pass their legislation, they do not want anybody else to pass meaningful legislation either, or perhaps they somehow think they are producing leverage for themselves by shredding this bill. This is, as I said earlier, this is a sad case. My great friend and mentor Dick Bolling, who used to be the chairman of the Committee on Rules, and in my view is the greatest Member of this body who never became Speaker. Dick Bolling used to deride Members who practiced what he called dung hill politics, Members who were more interested in protecting the jurisdiction of their own committee than they were in protecting the legislative reputation and record of the House as a whole. What we have seen today is a sad, sad example of what Dick Bolling worried about when he referred to that practice of ``dung hill politics.'' I wish the House were in a more mature mood, and I wish that the leadership had led so we could have avoided this point today. There is no point, in my view, in proceeding further with this bill. I intend to vote against it on final passage because there will be nothing left of it except the title. We have a motion around here called ``striking the enacting clause.'' Instead, I suggest today we should probably strike everything except the enacting clause because we will have almost done that by the time we get to the last page of this bill. All we will have done is waste a day and a half of the House's time when we could have been dealing with more serious business, and that, indeed, is a shame.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, at this point, this bill looks like an accident that started out to happen to somebody else. I would like to ask one question of the gentleman from Oklahoma. It is my understanding that, with this unanimous consent agreement, that Members can count on the fact that the last vote on this bill will begin at noon tomorrow. It is my understanding that the leadership intends to bring up a suspension bill after consideration of this bill but that the last vote on this bill will start around noon tomorrow. Is that not correct?

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, with that understanding, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, we now have 8 million people out of work. There are 3 million people that have been out of work so long that they have lost their unemployment benefits, and the majority party in this Congress has steadfastly refused to allow us to do something about that by providing extended unemployment benefits for those workers. At the same time, for people who are working and people who are not, we have a resurrection of inflation. Inflation is running at twice the rate this year that it ran last year. That means it cost families more to pay for gas, more to pay for health care, more to pay for college costs, and it will continue to rise. Working families need every dollar in their take-home pay that they can possibly get, and yet the administration has chosen this time to institute new regulations which for the first time in 50 years scaled back workers' entitlement to overtime pay for overtime worked. Mr. Chairman, this amendment attempts to do two things. It is a very simple amendment. It simply precludes the agency from using any funds in this bill to implement those limiting regulations. We make one exception. We allow the expansion of overtime rights made available under the new rule for workers making between $8,000 and $23,660 to stand as is. But we effectively block enforcement of the other portions of the rule. It just seems to me that the Labor Department, the White House, and the Congress should not be complicit in the effort of employers to chisel on workers' overtime pay. If this amendment does not pass, more than 900,000 employees without a college or graduate degree will be exempt from overtime pay because of definitions of professional employees. Thirty thousand nursery school and Head Start teachers will lose their right to overtime pay. Nearly 90,000 computer employees, funeral directors and licensed embalmers will become exempt and lose their right to pay under the Labor Department rule, and there are many other workers as well who will lose their overtime rights. Mr. Chairman, this is a very simple amendment. Everyone understands it. This House has already voted on a motion to instruct to adopt precisely the same language we are offering today, and the Senate has already adopted the same proposal in the form of the Harkin amendment. Despite that fact, the Republican leadership arbitrarily stripped that language out from the conference report last year. This time around we mean business. We mean to see this through. We will not be dissuaded by blackmail threats on the part of the White House that they will veto the bill if this provision which we are offering today is included. It is very simple. If you are on the side of a worker's right to get overtime pay for overtime worked, you vote for this amendment. If you are not on their side, then you vote against this amendment, or you vote for some other mugwump fig leaf that will serve not to cover workers, but simply to cover the fannies of Members who will be voting this afternoon. point of order

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I do. Mr. Chairman, this amendment does what it says. This amendment is a straightforward limitation which prohibits the Department of Labor from using funds in the act to implement any change to overtime regulations that were in effect on July 14, 2004, with one exception. It imposes no additional duties on the Secretary of Labor, nor does it change existing law since the language merely says that funds may not be used to change overtime regulations in place on July 14, 2004. Moreover, the amendment allows, but does not require, the Department to implement or administer section 541.6 of the overtime regulation published in the Federal Register on April 23, 2004. The Department has a duty to know its own regulations; and, therefore, the amendment imposes no new duties. The limitation applies only to the appropriation under consideration in this bill and is operable only for the fiscal year for which the appropriations apply. I, therefore, ask the Chair not to sustain the point of order.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I stand on my statement and ask that the Chair not sustain the point of order.

Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I never fully appreciated until this moment the immense talent of the gentleman from Ohio, but listening to what he said, I must take my hat off to him because he certainly qualifies for the Nobel Prize for fiction. That is an amazing accomplishment in this House, given the competition for that award. I simply want to say that if you take a look at the Congressional Research Service analysis of this amendment, they make quite clear, quote, `` A review of applicable principles of administrative procedure and pertinent judicial precedents indicates that the Department of Labor would have the authority to immediately reimplement overtime compensation regulations in effect prior to August 23, 2004, upon passage of the proposed Obey-Miller rider.'' That means that they can on their own volition reinstitute those rules within 1 day. To suggest that they would not do so suggests that they are patently irresponsible.

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

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, let me simply say, I understand the gentleman is trying to make a point, but the fact is, as the sponsor of the amendment, I will state categorically that legally the administration has the authority to reimpose those regulations within 1 day. And to suggest that they would not and leave the case that the gentleman is talking about is to suggest that they are even more irresponsible than I think they are.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, the CRS memo states that the general rule requiring publication of a final rule not less than 30 days before its effective date may likewise be voided ``as otherwise provided by the agency for good cause found and published with the rule.'' That means that they can reinstitute those rules on their own volition in 1 day. I thank the gentleman.