Ralph Regula

Mr. REGULA

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. I just want to say, in response to the gentlewoman from California, that we have been negotiating with the administration on a continuous basis. Some of the changes were in response to their requests. The only problem is they kept moving the goal posts. I thought it was interesting that it took them 6 hours after they vetoed the bill to decide what the veto message would say, because I think they had some problems. They recognized it was a good bill, and yet they felt that they had a commitment to close the parks and close the forests and close the Smithsonian and close the Holocaust and close the National Gallery of Art. And so, after finally pondering as to why they did veto the bill, we got a veto message late in the day. I say to my colleagues that are wondering procedurally, we are not going to call for a vote on this motion to discharge the bill from the appropriations process, and we will go into the next hour of debate on the override itself. But I hope at that time the 89 Members of the minority party that voted to override the President for the securities lawyers will vote to override the President for the people.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I think it is important that we respond to the gentleman from Illinois. Number one, he made a great case for overriding the President's veto. He pointed out all of the things that are happening, how people are being penalized in so many different ways, how the health is in jeopardy for Indians and so on. There is a very simple way to cure that, I would say to the gentleman, my friend from Illinois, and that is, vote to override the President's veto. This bill, as we well know, has a lot of good things in it. Let me just mention a couple. We are talking about the Native Americans being second class. One- fourth, 25 percent of the money in this bill is for Native Americans, $3 billion. They are hardly second class when we are appropriating 3 billion taxpayer dollars to support the many and varied programs. As I would point out, we did respond, actually we put more in the conference and in the bill that finally went to the White House than was requested by the President during earlier negotiations.

Mr. REGULA. I yield to the gentleman from Illinois.

Mr. REGULA. As the gentleman would recognize, though, that in the negotiations, and I want to address that, the gentleman said that we made no attempt to work with the White House. We did and I have a whole list of things here that we changed in response to the White House. They said initially, and I would add they keep moving the goal posts, that is part of the problem; we no sooner respond to the White House's request than the goalposts move. They asked for $110 million, this is not the original request, this is after we were in conference, they asked for $110 million over the Senate-passed level. We ended up with $111.5 million over the Senate, plus $25 million additional for the Indian Health Service. And I could go through the whole list of things that the White House requested during the conference to which we responded, perhaps not totally, but as much as possible. Part of what is at issue here is how much we are going to spend. I have to agree, we are not spending as much as the minority party would like. But the American people have said, we are not willing to borrow money from our grandchildren to fund today's programs. So the allocation to us was 10 percent under 1995's appropriation.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I would only point out that with $3 billion, they are not actually being deprived. That is a lot of money. It goes to these many programs. The person that is depriving the Indians of access to these funds is the President of the United States. I hope that 89 of my colleagues will recognize that today, as they did on the securities litigation legislation, and will support the fact that we want this $3 billion to go to the Indian programs. The gentleman mentioned increasing cuts. Certainly we had to reduce spending to meet the 10 percent reduction goal. But I have to say that I think we have done a responsible job, given the fiscal constraints. The gentleman and I have served on this committee for many years together and in the past years we were always able to spend more each year. That made life easy. We just added another 5 percent to everybody's program or 3 or whatever the number was, and everybody was happy. Because the American people, in November of 1994, said, wait a minute, we do not want to put our grandchildren in debt. They already owe $20,000 apiece. We do not want to add to that for Government programs. So as a result the Committee on the Budget gave us 10 percent less than 1995. So instead of having an increase, as we have had in the past, we had a reduction. So we did it and we worked together in many respects. We did the must-dos. We flat funded the parks, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery so they can stay open for the public, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service. We did the need-to-does, things that needed to be fixed, repairs and so on. The nice-to-dos took a hit. There is no question about it. We abolished the Bureau of Mines. We did a number of other things. But frankly, unless we are willing to continue borrowing money from future generations, we are simply going to have to restrain our spending. That is what we did here. We tried to do it in a fair manner. I do not think the gentleman would disagree that given the fiscal constraints we had that we were at least bipartisan in allocating the money.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I would say to the gentleman that the original was, I think, something like 450. We got it back to 418. But the money we put in the bill, which is the real world, limits the cut to exactly or a little less than has been cut in the past during the time that the gentleman was chairman of this committee.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I would be surprised because history tells us that the money we put in will probably result in a smaller cut, and I would also point out to the gentleman that it is the President's chief of the Forest Service, appointed by the President, that is managing the Tongass as part of the Forest Service. Therefore, decisions that are made along the lines the gentleman is discussing will be made by the employees or certainly the executive branch appointees that have responsible positions. There is no way that they can, by magic, create money out of the air so that with the money that is in the bill, the cut really is restricted to what we have had in the past.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I would tell the gentleman No. 1, in the recommittal we took out the sufficiency language with the exception of one sale. This is a parallel to what happened when the gentleman was chairman on the Oregon situation at the request of Senator Hatfield. Any further sales other than the one that is just changing the location are subject to sufficiency language, which means it has to go through the courts, through the EPA and all the requirements.

Mr. REGULA. The language that was placed in the bill that the gentleman was chairing?

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I notice that the President never even mentioned that in his override message.

Mr. REGULA. Because they were a party to it.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, how could he write the statement until he had the bill? He vetoed the bill at 11 a.m. We did not get the veto message until 5 p.m. explaining his decision. So he had 6 hours, if he wanted to get it in there.

Mr. REGULA. Well, we are having a good discussion. I do not want to use too much of my time here.

Mr. REGULA

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Yates]. Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot of debate on this subject. I have a number of Members that would like to speak on it, so I will reserve my remarks for the closing. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California [Mr. Calvert].

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Ehlers].

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Kolbe], an excellent member of our subcommittee. (Mr. KOLBE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California [Mr. Radanovich]

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Gilchrest].

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington [Mr. Nethercutt], an excellent member of our subcommittee.

Mr. REGULA. Is the gentleman aware there is a moratorium on issuing mining patents which is included in this bill?

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Iowa [Mr. Ganske].

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Tauzin]. (Mr. TAUZIN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Tauzin].

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

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.