John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to recognize the 150th anniversary of Newberry College, which is in my 5th Congressional District of South Carolina. In celebrating this milestone, I am pleased to join the State of South Carolina, the City of Newberry, Newberry College, and the Newberry College Alumni Association. I want to pay special tribute to the Association's international symposium, planned for April 2006, which recognizes the life and work of the college's founder, the Rev. Dr. John Bachman, by presenting the following joint proclamation to the U.S. House of Representatives. A Joint Proclamation for John Bachman Month Whereas, at an early age in New York State the future Dr. Bachman showed strong interest in studies of natural history and religion, particularly the works of Martin Luther; and Whereas, the esteemed Dr. Bachman traveled south in January 1815 from his birthplace to Charleston, South Carolina to become pastor of St. John's Lutheran Church; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman served St. John's faithfully and honorably as her beloved pastor for an amazing and productive fifty-six years, during which time he became a true pillar of the Charleston community; and Whereas, contrary to civil statutes and community standards of the time, Dr. Bachman educated Charleston slaves and freemen of African descent and baptized hundreds, perhaps thousands, into membership at St. John's during his tenure; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman helped form and served twice as President of the South Carolina Lutheran Synod, from 1824 to 1833 and again from 1839 to 1840; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman, as Synod President, took action that led to establishment in 1831 of a school to train Lutheran ministers, now known as the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary of Columbia, South Carolina; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman had a keen interest in natural history of the South Carolina Low Country and discovered or described many birds and mammals previously unknown to science; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman was a seminal and active member of the ``Circle of Naturalists,'' whose work in various natural history fields made antebellum Charleston a scientific center equal in importance to such cities as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York; and, Whereas, Dr. Bachman frequently published letters and short articles about his natural history observations in local and regional publications (including the South Carolina Medical Journal), and gave public lectures on these topics to audiences of both learned and lay people; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman hosted John James Audubon in 1831 when the famous bird artist visited Charleston, thereby beginning a lifelong friendship and professional collaboration; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman was instrumental in founding the South Carolina State Horticultural Society in 1833; and Whereas, various scientists have seen fit to recognize Dr. Bachman's natural history contributions by naming three North American birds, two mammals, and one butterfly in his honor, including Bachman's Warbler (Vermivora bachmanii), Bachman's Sparrow (Aimophila aestivalis bachmani), Bachman's (now Black) Oystercatcher (Haematopus bachmani), Bachman's Brush Rabbit (Sylvilagus bachmanii), Bachman's Fox squirrel (Sciurus niger bachmani), and the Snout Butterfly (Libytheana bachmanii); and Whereas, Dr. Bachman encouraged African-American members of St. John's Lutheran Church to enter the ministry, nurturing nationally known clergymen such as Jehu Jones (first African- American Lutheran minister ordained in North America), Boston Jenkins Drayton (missionary to Liberia and eventual Chief Justice of the Liberian Supreme Court), and Daniel Alexander Payne (sixth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church); and Whereas, Dr. Bachman served on the Board of Trustees of the College of Charleston from 1834 until 1848; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman in 1838 sailed for England and Europe, where he was greeted as a scientist of renown and awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Berlin; and Whereas, in 1840 Dr. Bachman and John James Audubon began work on The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, an illustrated folio on mammals equal in importance, quality, and artistic grandeur to Audubon's earlier Birds of North America; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman wrote the entire descriptive text of the Quadrupeds and, in collaboration with Audubon's sons, brought the work to publication in folio and quarto formats beginning in 1845; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman through his marriage to Harriett Martin, produced many sons and daughters (two of the latter eventually marrying two sons of John James Audubon), and creating a lineage that continues through many accomplished American families; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman was elected to a three-year term as Vice President of the Charleston Library Society in 1845; and Whereas, in 1848 Dr. Bachman began a five-year teaching position as Professor of Natural History at the College of Charleston; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman published numerous important natural history papers including Two Letters on Hybridity (1850), Notice of the Types of Mankind by Nott and Gliddon (1854), and Examination of Professor Agassiz's Sketch of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World (1855); and Whereas, in 1851 Dr. Bachman journeyed to the National Capital in Washington, meeting with President Millard Fillmore to lobby for federal action that in a time of political unrest would mollify the Southern states and preserve the Union; and Whereas, in 1853 Dr. Bachman published A Defense of Luther and the Reformation in which he countered on-going Charleston-area attacks on Protestantism; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman was instrumental in founding in December 1856 the Lutheran-based Newberry College, an extant liberal arts institution at Newberry, South Carolina; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman served as first president of the Newberry College Board of Trustees beginning in January 1857, and during his tenure took many actions at the College to assure the high quality of secular and religious education that has continued for 150 years; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman became co-editor of Southern Lutheran magazine in 1860; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman, although a Unionist, led the opening prayer for guidance at Institute Hall in Charleston as the State of South Carolina met on 20 December 1860 to discuss whether to vote for secession, after which he withdrew from political activities and devoted his energies to ministering the sick and needy; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman survived and continued his good work and scholarship despite a beating by Union soldiers that permanently paralyzed his arm; and Whereas, in 1864 Dr. Bachman published Characteristics of Genera and Species, as Applicable to the Doctrine of Unity in the Human Race, in which he argued from a scientific perspective that all humans (including slave and master) were the same species--a radical, controversial, visionary, and correct pronouncement that took great courage on his part, particularly amid the turmoil of the Civil War; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman was a true renaissance man devoted to his church and to his God, to science and natural history, to his community and country, and to secular and religious education--particularly of African Americans in antebellum and post-war Charleston; and Whereas, Dr. Bachman's legacy is alive and well at Newberry College, which--led by its Alumni Association--will begin its Sesquicentennial Celebration on 20 April 2006 with a major four-day symposium entitled ``Nature, God, and Social Reform in the Old South: The Life and Work of the Rev. John Bachman''; and Whereas, esteemed international authorities on Bachman will make keynote presentations during the College's John Bachman Symposium; and Whereas, the public is invited to attend and participate in this auspicious event in the life of Newberry College by registering through the Symposium Web site at www.johnbachman.org; and Whereas, as noted by the many diverse accomplishments listed above, Dr. Bachman had lasting and wide-ranging impact on science, education, religion, and social progress in South Carolina, the United States, and beyond; and Whereas, the month of February is significant because Dr. Bachman was born on February 4, 1790, and died eighty-four years and twenty days later on February 24, 1874; Now, therefore, the State of South Carolina, the City of Newberry, Newberry College, and the Newberry College Alumni Association do hereby proclaim through the powers vested in Governor Mark Sanford, Mayor T. Edward Kyzer, President Mitchell M. Zais, and Symposium Chair William J. Hilton Jr. that April 2006 shall be designated as ``John Bachman Month'' throughout the State of South Carolina, and urge all citizens to recognize this observance and to attend the John Bachman Symposium at Newberry College.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I cannot rise to the heights of Charlie Rangel, but I rise in tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen. For years, it seems we have considered bills honoring the contributions of these heroic airmen. It is about time this one passed and passed with huge support. Their achievements in support of our efforts in World War II have inspired books and movies. They have earned decorations and awards for valor that are too numerous to cite. As Mr. Rangel noted, 992 graduated from pilot training at Tuskegee; 450 went overseas to North Africa and Italy; some 150 died either in training or in combat missions. And yet, though they were shot down, not a single bomber, as Mr. Rangel noted, among the many they escorted was ever shot down. While their accomplishments have been recognized by the military, the military in truth cannot adequately honor all of their accomplishments because these men fought and won other battles that were not military in nature. They defied those who thought they lacked the intelligence, the skills, the courage, even the patriotism to fly and fight. Their courage in the air is legendary, but their courage on the ground and in our society made their achievements in the air all the more meaningful and remarkable. Today, the impact of the Tuskegee Airmen reaches far beyond the skies of Italy and North Africa. Their service led to social changes in our country that include the integration of our Armed Forces. In 1948, Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, directing equality of treatment and opportunity in all of the armed services. President Truman's order ended racial segregation in the military and was a major step towards ending racial segregation in the United States of America. Today, we recognize the Tuskegee Airmen for valor in battle, but also for accomplishments that succeeded, that transcended the battlefield like Executive Order 9981. The Tuskegee Airmen, the 99th Fighter Squadron and the 332d Fighter Group, not only deserve the Congressional Gold Medal, they will add luster to it. I salute the Tuskegee Airmen and I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, it is easy to criticize the contents of this reconciliation bill because it hurts children, single-parent families, students struggling to finance their college education, and many others who are the most vulnerable among us. But I rise today to criticize the process because this a process known as reconciliation; and the purpose of reconciliation is that as you come to the end of a budget season, we use this to change mandatory spending and change revenues so that you reconcile the actual budget to what otherwise would occur. Ordinarily in the past, reconciliation has led to deficit reduction. That is the purpose. That is the reason it is a priority process in the budget process. In the budget summit agreement of 1990, we saved $482 billion in budget reconciliation; in 1993, we saved $433 billion in reconciliation; in the balanced budget agreement of 1997, we saved $118 billion. So what do we save today when you put together this spending-cut bill, $39 billion in reconciled spending cuts, with the tax bill that will follow it, the reconciliation tax bill? You add $17 billion to the deficit over that period of time. There is no deficit reduction. Worse still, if you look back at all of the taxes we passed in this budget cycle this previous year leading up to fiscal year 2006, starting with the transportation bill and including the energy bill and including a 1-year patch, $31 billion, in the Alternative Minimum Tax, the total tax reduction comes to $122 billion. But let me remind you, I just included and we have just included, they just included in this tax bill, $31 billion, a 1-year fix in the AMT. If all of these taxes are reflected on a 5-year basis, there is an additional $167 billion to add to that. Here is the bottom line. Here is what you are voting for today if you vote for this bill. If you look at it over a true 5-year time period and add up all of the taxes in addition to the reconciliation tax cuts that have been passed in this budget cycle, the addition to the deficit is $380 billion after deducting the $40 billion included in this reconciliation bill. That is the net effect on the deficit. So anybody coming here to the well of the House or going to the voting machine to register his or vote thinking that this is going to reduce the deficit has another thought coming. This bill will increase the deficit, considering the tax cuts that have been passed this past year. It will leave us with a deficit increase of $280 billion over the next 5 years. That is why the process is a sham and that is reason enough to vote against the bill.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. We have before us a conference report that everybody should understand there has really been no conference in which House and Senate Democrats have had any meaningful role. Our objection to this bill begins with its title: The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. Let us be honest, this bill does not reduce the deficit. When this reconciliation bill with spending cuts is paired with its counterpart, the reconciliation bill with tax cuts, the deficit is actually increased, not decreased; and the increase in the deficit gets worse when you add, as I think you should, the $50 bill in other tax cuts passed by the House over the last few months. At the outset, the proponents of this bill called it necessary in order to help pay for hurricanes Katrina and Rita. That has proven to be a false claim, too. This bill has nothing to do with paying for Katrina. It has everything to do with facilitating further tax cuts. This bill comes out of a budget resolution that calls for a total of $106 billion in new and additional tax cuts, $70 billion reconciled, $36 billion unreconciled. So the spending cuts in this bill are really just the first step in a three-step process. Step two will come when the tax cuts reconciliation bill emerges from conference. When these two bills are paired, the result will be a deficit bigger by about $60 billion over 5 years. Then there is a third step. There is an increase in the national debt pending, an increase in the national debt ceiling of $781 billion necessary to accommodate budgets like the 2006 budget being passed here tonight. This increase was deemed approved when the Republican budget resolution passed the House several months ago. Over the last 4 fiscal years, to make room for budgets of the Bush administration and budgets that have been passed by the majority in this House, we have had to raise the legal debt ceiling of the United States by $3.15 trillion to accommodate those budgets. Once upon a time, the purpose of reconciliation was to rein in the deficit; but as you can see from the charts I am about to put up, and I knew this was just what you wanted me to serve you for breakfast this morning, more numbers and more charts, so I did not disappoint. First of all, when you put this chart up, you can see what the debt increases have been over the last 4 or 5 fiscal years: $3.15 trillion. As Casey Stengel said, ``If you don't believe it, you can look it up.'' $3.15 trillion. Next, let me show you what reconciliation in past years has accomplished as opposed to what reconciliation this year will accomplish in terms of reducing the deficit. In past years, for example the Bush budget summit in 1990, the deficit reduction due to reconciliation was $482 billion. In the Clinton budget in 1993, the deficit reduction due to reconciliation was $433 billion. In the balanced budget agreement of 1997, reconciliation produced savings of $118 billion over 5 years. This bill saves nothing. It aggravates and worsens the deficit. Now, it is fair to ask: Why have the Republicans, those who put this budget together, why have they put spending cuts in one bill and tax cuts in another bill? Why did they not just combine the two so we could keep tabs on everything with one reconciliation bill? Which is typically what we have done in the past. Well, there is a reason for this hiatus between spending cuts and tax cuts. The spending cuts made by this bill will hit the young, the old, the sick, and the poor, and hit them rather hard. The savings realized from these spending cuts will help offset tax cuts for top-bracket taxpayers. Our Republican colleagues want to avoid that connection, so they have produced two separate bills, one for tax cuts, and then a little later on, one for spending cuts. Who bears the brunt of these bills? Single mothers still do. Despite some moderation in the effect of the cuts that were proposed originally, single mothers still take about a $2 billion hit. Students struggling to pay for their college education. The hit on student loans is $12.7 billion. The sick and the poor, whose only access to medical care is Medicaid. Medicaid still suffers a hit of $7 billion. So these cuts have been moderated in the conference with the Senate, but some of the worst of the House bill provisions are still there. A bit less significant, but still hurtful to the people who are the victims of these particular cuts. And bear this in mind. Bear this in mind. This bill still increases, for all of the cuts it makes, still increases the deficit, still uses spending cuts to offset tax cuts, and still cuts services for the least among us, the most vulnerable and poorest Americans. In short, there are many reasons this bill does not live up to its title, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. It makes deep and painful cuts still, only to pave the way for new and additional tax cuts and never mind the deficit. The result is a larger deficit. So in this respect, today's legislation is like the budget resolution that set it in motion. This is one of a series of fiscal actions that will cause the debt ceiling of the United States at the end of this year to be move to $3.15 trillion. Bear in mind that when the Bush administration came to office, it inherited a surplus and predicted that this surplus would endure even if its trillion dollar tax cuts were adopted. Well, the Bush budget was adopted, and in fiscal 2005 the bottom line was not a surplus of $269 billion, as once projected, but a deficit of $319 billion. Realistic estimates from CBO show that if you take the Bush budget of 2006 as last proposed in July, and they are updated, if you take that budget and run it out 10 years with all the assumptions made in the Bush budget, these are the results. The deficit of last year, which was $320 billion, this is CBO, will go to $640 billion, if you follow the trajectory shown here, the curve shown here. The deficit goes from $320 billion to $640 billion. It doubles. Debt service on the debt goes from $182 billion last year to $458 billion in 10 years, and the national debt doubles. That is the course we are embarked upon as we do one more part of a long series of fiscal actions that are leading us deeper and deeper into debt, and nobody should be fooled by what is happening here on the House floor tonight. Once the pieces are all put together, and you can see the whole puzzle, this means a deeper deficit and no resolution to the problem before us. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time. Mr. Speaker, lest anyone think that we are about to launch a bill here that will lead us to a balanced budget, let me disabuse you of that illusion. First of all, let us look at some of the specific items in this particular package to see whether or not they are real in the way of budget reduction. For example, this bill calls for the abolition of mandatory spending to administer the student loan program. Now, how do you administer the student loan program if you do not provide the funding for it? If you do not provide the mandatory funding for it, it has to come out of discretionary funding. That means we will be underfunding No Child Left Behind and other discretionary educational programs by $2 billion a year more, because that is where the money for administration of the student loan programs will have to come from if you bar its coming from mandatory spending. It is a phony cut. Secondly, $3.6 billion is scored as a revenue to offset these spending increases, $3.6 billion in PBGC premiums. Now why is that not allowable? In my good accounting book, if you book all of the liabilities that PBGC is faced with over the foreseeable future, there is no net balance in that account, even after you add this $3.6 billion. That money is entrusted. It is encumbered and it cannot fairly be said to be available in the general fund to offset other spending. In truth, it will be spent much, much too soon anyway, and we will have to replenish it. Third, child support enforcement. You have moderated that. You have brought it down from $4.9 billion, which was absurd, to $1.5 billion, which still hurts. You either shift that expense to the States that are responsible for child support enforcement, or parents who are looking to delinquent parents to pay their child support will have less assistance, and they will collect less in the way of child support. It is a false economy. You say there are no tax increases in your bill. But the PBGC premium increase is certainly equivalent to the same thing. It will come out of paychecks. And the Medicare part B under your provisions is certainly going up. It will come out of Social Security checks. It is offset. And then there is another thing about your bill that is myopic that gives us real problems with it. In looking for places to cut, you wholly ignore any kind of revenue effects connected with your tax cut agenda. And the way you are able to do this, and avoid responsibility for it, is you break the tax cuts into so many small pieces that you clutter the audit trail and make it hard for anybody, Members and otherwise, to follow just how big the tax tab, the tax cut tab is adding up to. So let me take two charts here and try to reconstruct the path, the audit trail of tax cuts that has been implemented since the budget resolution for 2006 was passed just a few minutes ago, a few months ago, and what it means for the bottom line, that is, the deficit. Let us start with the highway bill passed earlier this year. This revenue impact is about $500 million over 5 years. Next comes the energy policy act. Revenue loss over 5 years is $7.9 billion. Then there is the Katrina tax relief act of 2005, which we adopted a few weeks ago. It has a revenue head of $6 billion. The biggest tax cuts come from that bill that is waiting in the wings for this bill to be passed; and it will come along a little bit later, the Tax Extension Reconciliation Act of 2006, 20005. It entails tax cuts for $56 billion over 5 years passed by this House, $80 billion over 10 years. Then there is the so-called Stealth Tax Relief Act, patching the alternative minimum tax for this year so that it affects no more taxpayers than it affected last year. The cost for 1 year: $31.2 billion. Covers only 1 year. The Tax Revision Act of 2005 is just a sundry assortment of tax measures; but it has a revenue cost too, $153 million over 5 years. And finally there is the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, revenue impact: $7 billion. Now, add all of these together and you will see that the total revenue impact entailed by these tax policies comes to $110 billion. So this reconciliation bill offsets about $40 billion of that amount, leaving an additional debt of around $80 billion. That is the net effect of this reconciliation bill. That is why we say it does not decrease the deficit when you pair it up with this other reconciliation bill, the tax cuts. It increases the deficit. But that is not all. That is not the worst of it. As we have shown, in patching up the AMT last year and again this year, it has to be fixed or it is going to raise the taxes of middle- income taxpayers for whom it was never intended. If we do basically in future years what we have done this year, the revenue impact of patching the AMT is shown right here, $167 billion. That makes the revenue impact of all seven tax cuts $307 billion. Offset your 40 billion against that, you have still got $267 billion in tax reduction over the next 5 years. That is why I say it is myopic. You are looking for solutions to this problem and overlooking one of the bases of the problem, ignoring the fact that if we are going to tackle a deficit worth 320 and rising, we have got to have action on the spending side of the ledger and on the tax side of the ledger as well. That is the problem here, and that is why I say if you leave here thinking, after voting for this bill, that you have begun a series of fiscal actions that will bring the budget to heel, that you will finally reduce the deficit of $320 million, you are badly, badly disillusioned. Once again, let me show you a chart the CBO did for us last September when we asked them to take the budget that they had just portrayed out over a 10-year period of time and apply to it the President's budget policy as enunciated in his July mid-term review. This is what happened. They said, you are going to follow this path right here that takes you to 640 billion total deficit, a doubling of the deficit over 10 years. You are going to increase the debt service in the United States from $182 billion to $458 billion 10 years from now, and you are going to double the national debt. That is the path we are on, and this bill tonight will not divert us 1 inch. Indeed, it will aggravate that path and that is the plea that I am making to you. That is why you should vote against this bill. Reject it now. Come back next year. Let us do something realistic about deficit reduction. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland 3\1/2\ minutes.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, it may be 5:15 in the morning, but that is not our fault. We would liked to have done this in the light of day with a little more time to look at this package. Here is what we have got just 1 hour ago. When we unpacked the package to see what was in it, we had the Speaker's press release, which told us earlier in the evening that, by golly, you would come up with $41.6 billion in total spending reductions. We got this package, and, finally, looking through 700 pages, we finally got a summary of the action taken, and they came to $39.7 billion. It was $1.9 billion less than the Speaker had claimed earlier. Even for government work, that is not very close. Here is the Speaker's press release. We discern that this difference came from the fact that between the Speaker's press release and the release of this voluminous document here called the budget resolution, or the budget reconciliation bill, there was a deal made with the medical equipment manufacturers and suppliers with respect to Medicare reimbursement, a deal that costs your total package $1.9 billion. If I am not right, I would like to be corrected, which leads us to ask, if you could adjust for them to the tune of $1.9 billion, couldn't we have gone back and looked at student loans and moderated the cuts being inflicted on them? Couldn't we have gone back and looked at children with delinquent dads and moderated what we were doing with respect to the cuts in child support enforcement, foster care, and the other things that are still in this bill? If you could do that for the medical equipment manufacturers, couldn't you do it for the least of these? Mr. Speaker, it may be 5:20 in the morning, but Mr. Dingell is still up and ready for a good fight. I yield to the gentleman for 4 minutes. (Mr. DINGELL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the Democratic whip.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, we have handled, the conference has handled, leadership has handled, and the staff, a record number of amendments in a record period of time. And while I have some problems with the process, I commend them for the end result. It is a good piece of work. There are many good features to it. We retained intact the McCain language which prohibits the United States from engaging in torture of prisoners. There are a number of very fine personnel improvements here which our service personnel dearly deserve. We have given the impetus to start up something called a caps reliable replacement warhead program but at the same time put it within reasonable and restrictive bounds, which I think is smart. And I could go on and on. There are some good features to this bill. I am not criticizing anyone in particular when I say that I find fault with the process, but I have been on this committee for 23 years, all the time I have served here. And, unfortunately, given the time restraints, which were largely the result of the fact that the Senate put us on abbreviated schedule, they were late getting their bill done, we have had to do this with much too much haste. Here is the bill right here that we are about to consider, and we only saw it really in final form on Friday afternoon. We were appointed at one hour, and at the very next hour we were meeting for our first and only formal meeting. I hope this will not become a precedent for the process in the future, and that is why I express this concern now. The bill itself I support. I am also very concerned about what is happening to the defense appropriations bill, and I do not want to see it happen to our defense authorization bill. We do not want our bill to become a must-pass piece of legislation to which other bills, other wholly unrelated legislation, gets attached because ours is must-pass legislation, a moving vehicle. That could have happened to this very bill, and it is the reason we are standing here at 12:30 at night instead of dealing with it yesterday afternoon with much more leisure than we are giving to the bill right now because it was almost hijacked by something totally extraneous. And I would say to the chairman I am glad that this did not happen, glad that we have got a clean bill, and glad that we can vote on it without having these extraneous matters to consider and weigh. Once again, congratulations on a job well done.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. I have been on the conference committee every year for at least 20 years, and I never seen this happen before. I have never seen the leadership of either party come forth and say, you may have signed it, you may have closed it, you may have signed and sealed and delivered it; but we can still change it and add to it things that are totally out of the scope, out of scope because they are not in the jurisdiction of our committee, and out of scope because they have never been considered by either committee in either House, hearings, markup, on the floor, in the committee, anywhere. Totally out of the blue to come at the 11th hour. And to impose this on the bill in deference to wealthy contributors who do not want to be encumbered with limits on what they can contribute is outrageous. There is no nicer word for it.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. And I would like to turn to a matter of some significant concern to me and to the gentleman because, as he said, we both serve on the House Armed Services Committee. We both have worked diligently to see a good Defense authorization bill put together this year and finally, we thought, put to bed last week. But here is what is happening, to everybody's dismay, on this side of the line. On Thursday afternoon, the House appointed conferees on the Defense authorization bill to go to conference with the Senate. Thursday afternoon. Within hours, the conference committee met for the first and only time. We made a cursory review, which is all we had time for, of the conference report which staff and mainly the Republican Members had worked up and put together over the last several weeks. We reviewed it. We reviewed the salient points. We made some objections. And finally, we approved it. This summary procedure is not my idea or I think the Framers' idea of how we would make law, particularly law that authorizes the expenditure of $440 billion for something as important as the defense of this Nation. This kind of summary procedure should not be repeated. This year, we were late getting started. The Senate was even later getting started. So we had to do it in record time. And I am glad we got it done, but it is not the best procedure. As bad as that procedure is, the worst was yet to come. After the conference report had been signed, signed by the Democratic conferees, signed by the Republican conferees, signed by the Senate, signed by the House, after it had been signed, the Republican leadership decided it needed a must-pass moving vehicle, some kind of bill to which they could attach legislation that otherwise could not be passed, maybe would not stand the light of day. Reputedly, it dealt with section 527, political advocacy corporations and campaign limits. We suspected it also dealt with a bill known as Pence-Wynn. We do not know yet because we have not seen the conference report that they have tried to amend. In any event, we know this: These bills are about campaign finance reform. They have absolutely nothing to do with the defense of the United States. This is not a technical change they are trying to make. It is not even about defense. Far from it. Worse still, it is fundamentally serious major legislation. It is not something minor that you bobtail on or piggyback on another bill. Pence-Wynn, if that is the legislation they are trying to append to this conference report, is a major fundamental revamping of the campaign finance laws of this country, lifting the limits enormously on all kinds of corporations from PACs and individuals, creating virtual carte blanche for the wealthy of this country to contribute to political campaigns. Our ranking member, Mr. Skelton of Missouri, heard what was happened, to the extent that he could find out anything. He protested and pulled our names on the grounds, the House Democratic names, from the conference report on the grounds that they were amending or seeking to amend that the conference agreement that had been signed and sealed and all but delivered to the House floor for action, amending it after the fact, Members who were not even parties to the agreement trying to change the bill in a significant way without any kind of collegiality, any kind of comity, any kind of consultation with our side. He pulled our names. In the Senate, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Republican, the very distinguished Senator Warner, was so outraged to see this gross violation of the processes of the House, the procedures of the House and the Congress, of fundamental fair play, that he said, if the Republican leadership in the House tried to unilaterally change this agreement after it had been signed, he would vigorously object and pull out the signatories at least on the Republican side. And Mr. Levin, the gentleman from Michigan who is the Democratic Senator who is the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the very same thing. Now, we ask tonight, what is the status of this bill that has taken months to produce, that addresses our troops deployed all over the world, that contains important personnel provisions that probably will not be overlapped in the appropriations bill? Where is the bill that we have worked and produced, that we signed and had ready to go? Where is the bill? Where is the Defense authorization bill? Where is it left if we do not take action on it? It is left in limbo. It is left hanging. It is left unauthorized, unpassed. A hard effort coming to no worthy conclusion. Representative Pryce, who chairs the Republican conference, is quoted as saying in the CQ Daily that Congress may not even consider this bill before Christmas. Why not? It is ready to go. All we need is 1 hour on the floor. It is written. The conference report is ready to come to the floor. Why would we not consider it before Christmas? And, more importantly, what are the consequences if we do not consider it before Christmas? Well, let me tell my colleagues just a few of the things that will not be enacted that otherwise might be a nice package to send to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ramparts around the world where they are standing up for freedom. Let me just mention a few things that are not covered in the appropriation bill and may never come to pass if we do not pass this bill: There is a 3.1 percent pay increase. Not a big increase, but I am sure that every troop will be glad to get it. There is an end-strength increase. We think the ground forces are undersized, so we have called for a couple of years for an increase in the size of the ground forces, Army and Marines, 30,000 in the Army, 4,000 in the Marines, in fiscal year 2006. That will not be done. There is a death gratuity. The conference report increases the death gratuity for all active and activated servicemembers up to $100,000 retroactive to October 7, 2001. For the 2,100-odd troops who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Iraq in particular, I am sure this would be welcomed by their families as some token of appreciation for the ultimate sacrifice they had to pay. TRICARE: For the first time ever, reservists who agree to continue service in the Selected Reserves will have an opportunity, depending on their status, to buy into the government-subsidized TRICARE standard health program for themselves and their families. Recruiting: Enlistment bonuses will expire unless we reauthorize it. There is a whole list of things like this. Life insurance: It was previously increased for servicemen, life insurance, SGLI, to $400,000 in amount. We said in this bill, if they are in Iraq, if they are in Afghanistan, if they are putting their lives on the line in a hazardous duty zone, by golly, as a part of their hazardous duty pay, we will pay that first $150,000. I wanted to pay more of it. But that will be a nice addendum, a nice Christmas present for the troops who are in the field and for their families back home who worry, if our servicemember does not come home, who will provide for us? The least we can do is increase the life insurance. I could go down the list with other personnel changes. They are numerous. Let me give you just one. This conference report would extend TRICARE coverage also for children of servicemembers killed in the line of duty until they reached the age of 21. This is just a sampling of what will not be done if, for petty, high-handed partisan reasons, the conference report, already finished on the Defense authorization bill, is not brought to the floor. This is an outrage. It is an outrage. It is sort of inside baseball to some people, hard to explain to the American people because, in the parliamentary sense, it is so complicated. But it is an outrage, and it should not be allowed to happen. This is the one bill we should pass before we go home. I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.

Mr. SPRATT. I will guarantee you the people do not know what is going on. Until I got back this afternoon, I had to go home and make a speech and started reading some of these dailies that we get over our fax machines and got some phone calls from others who had found out, pieced it together. I did not know about it, so I am sure the American people do not know about it. Let me just take a second, if I can, maybe a minute or two, and read from the memo that was given to us as conferees just as to what the personnel provisions of this bill are. For the most part, these will not be backstopped by overlapping provisions in the appropriations bill. It simply will not be done unless and until this bill for 2006 is enacted. I already mentioned a pay raise of 3.1 percent to all servicemembers. I mentioned the increase in end strength needed for our stretched-out ground forces. The death gratuity is raised substantially to $100,000, but, even more important, provided for retroactively to October 7, 2001. And we remove, and only we can do this, we remove the combat- related requirement for the death gratuity. TRICARE, I mentioned the changes there. In addition, there are some other changes for TRICARE Reserve Select. It enhances that coverage, not as much as we wanted; but it is better than what we have got. Enlistment bonuses, the authority for those is increased substantially. We have got recruitment problems. We have retention problems. We need this authority to help our recruiters if they are to keep end strength in. The enlistment age. There are some folks out there that would like to get back into the service, age 42, still in good physical condition. This would allow persons who have previously served who would like to enlist again to be considered up to the age of 42. Here is something that everybody has noted, given the condition of many soldiers who are coming back from the Iraqi and Afghanistan theater: the establishment of a mental health task force that will look at how the Department and services can treat better, identify better, and support better mental health needs, particularly including post- traumatic stress disorder. It enhances programs and policies to improve the transition of servicemembers who are severely wounded or injured back into civilian life. It provides temporary authority to the Army to set up four innovative recruitment tests to see if it can improve its recruitment. It increases hardship duty pay to $750. It allows the establishment of a pilot program that would match enlisted members' contributions to the Thrift Savings Plan. It provides foreign language pay, which we badly need, given the shortage of Arab-speaking servicemembers, up to $12,000. It extends TRICARE, as I said earlier, for children of servicemembers killed in the line of duty until they reach 21 years of age, or 23 if they are a full-time student. These are just the personnel changes, but every one has a particular appeal to them. They were carefully considered in our committee and the Senate committee and put into the conference bill. Much of this will not be done if this bill does not get passed, and it certainly will not be done until it is finally enacted.

Mr. SPRATT. That is a very good example of something you can spend a lot of time on, but it is important to troops. They are over there fighting for our freedom. We need to make it possible for them to have the fundamental right to vote and make sure their vote will count, make sure it will not be held up somewhere and not get transmitted to be counted. That is not as easy as it seems in some cases. So we have to give a lot of consideration to it. That is one of the reasons this bill is done annually, every year, because we have to come back and look at what we did last year and see if it is working. If it is not, we make further adjustments and also find out what new problems have cropped up in the past year.

Mr. SPRATT. As the gentleman knows, we get the budget the second week in February. Our hearings start almost immediately in the authorization committee because we have got all four services, we have procurement, personnel, research and development, all kinds of issues that have to be thrashed out every year. We do not mark up and bring a bill to the floor typically until May, sometimes until June. Then we wait on the Senate to get their work done; and usually, if we are lucky, they get theirs done in July. If we are not lucky, theirs gets done in September or October, and we find ourselves playing catch-up, which is what we are doing in the extreme this year. Nevertheless, it is a year-long process. We carefully sift through all these issues. We go back to what we did the previous year and see if it worked. If it did not, we make adjustments. It is an ongoing, continual process. An immense amount of work goes into this. You can say the appropriators do the same thing; but their committee is much, much smaller than ours. Therefore, they do not get into all of these elements nearly as deeply as we do. That is why this authorization is so critically important as part of the process.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), the ranking member of the Education and Workforce Committee.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Dingell). (Mr. DINGELL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I would like to lay out now the basics of the motion to instruct conferees for the budget reconciliation bill going to conference. First of all, we would move to preserve the safety net. This motion instructs the conferees to eliminate House provisions that would cut food stamps by $697 million and to reject Medicaid cuts of even more, $11 to $12 billion in the House bill. In addition, we would move to protect higher education. Because the budget bill as now written on the House side calls for substantial changes in interest rates and fees, by our calculation raising the cost of student loans by as much as $5,800. Next we would support personal responsibility. The motion instructs the conferees to eliminate House cuts of $4.9 billion in Federal spending on child support enforcement programs that are run by the States but partially subsidized by the Federal Government. This is the most misguided fiscal savings in this whole bill. This motion instructs the conferees to eliminate the House provision that would prevent hundreds of companies also that are hurt by unfair foreign trade known as dumping through the continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act which the budget reconciliation bill would eliminate. This motion also instructs the House conferees to accept the Senate conferees' provisions that cut subsidies to Medicare private insurance plans by as much as 4.4 percent beginning January 1 and to prevent the planned 4.4 percent cut in physician payments by taking funds instead out of the Medicare Stabilization Program, the Medicare Stabilization Fund, which is part of the Medicare advantage and Medicare modernization bill which was the prescription drug-Medicare bill. This motion instructs conferees to protect taxpayer-owned property as well and the environment by eliminating House provisions that would sell huge tracts of Federal land at below market value and expose them to purchase commercial and mining development. These are the instructions we would give to our conferees going into this conference as to where the House should stand with respect to positions it has previously taken and with respect to positions the Senate has taken. I will say more about them later. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct conferees.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentlewoman, if she does not believe that we should do something about the potential cut, getting nearer by the day, of 4.4 percent in physician's reimbursement and in paying for it, what is wrong with going into the so-called Medicare stabilization fund, which is really inducement money to get HMOs and insurance companies that do not otherwise want to participate in Medicare to participate? The money is available. It comes out of the Medicare program. It would be given to physicians instead of insurance companies. But do you not think there will be adverse consequences if there is an across-the- board cut in physician's pay of 4.4 percent on January 1?

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentlewoman from Connecticut.

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentlewoman from Connecticut.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, it pains me to say it, but Republicans control the House, they control the Senate, they control the White House, and they cannot escape responsibility for the dismal condition our budget is in. Let me start with the simplest way I know to summarize the last 5 years. When the Bush administration brought us their budget in 2001, they said we will not need to raise the debt ceiling of the United States, the legal limit to which we can borrow, for another 6, 7 years. The next year they were back, hat in hand. They needed a $450 billion increase in the debt ceiling. The next year, just a year later, they came and asked for $984 billion, the biggest increase, single increase, in the national debt ever. As big as the total national debt when Ronald Reagan took office. One would have thought $984 billion had long legs and would have taken us several years at least, but, no. Within a year they were back, Secretary Snow, hat in hand, saying, I need $800 billion. And in this year's budget resolution as it passed the House, buried in it is a conditional provision to increase the debt ceiling by another $781 billion. If we add all of those up, we come up with $3.015 trillion. That is the net addition to the legal debt of the United States over the last 5 years. That should temper everybody's understanding of the debate we have just been holding. And look at this chart right here. Kind of complicated, but basically what we have done here is we have gone to the Congressional Budget Office and we have said, we have got your numbers for August and September, the update of the budget and the update of the economy. What you would like to do is make this politically realistic. Let us assume that the Bush administration's agenda is reaffirmed to us in July in the budget update; let us assume it is carried out. What will be the result? CBO came back to us, and they said the deficit of the United States last year, in 2004, in 2005, was $325 billion. That will grow to $640 billion under the assumptions you have given us. As for the debt service of the United States, it was $182 billion. It will grow to $548 billion over the next 10 years. That is the course we are on. And that is what we are discussing tonight. What do we do about it? There is a process called reconciliation. When we find ourselves in dire straits like this, this is an extraordinary process, reconciliation, which gives special primacy to a bill for this purpose adopted in a budget resolution, and at every other time we have used it since it was invented, it was used to reduce the deficit by big numbers because a lot of the cost growth that has to be dealt with in deficit reduction is in the entitlement programs. Look what we did in 1990 and 1993 and 1997: big, big reductions due to reconciliation. But what is being done here in the name of deficit reduction is deficit worsening. The deficit gets worse by at least $58 billion according to where the final cuts finally settle out. It gets worse by at least that amount, not better. And if we take a realistic view of what the likely revenue effects of all the tax cut legislation passed in the last 6 months have been, the deficit gets $300 billion worse. They have taken reconciliation and stood it on its head. We would like to stand it back up, put some of the values back in it. We do not think we should balance the budget on the backs of small children, on the backs of Medicaid beneficiaries. And that is what the purpose of this motion to instruct is.