John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, could the Chair advise me how much time is remaining on our side?

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton). (Mrs. CLAYTON asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott). (Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey).

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

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen). (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, my colleague may have noticed that I winced when I heard him speak up in the background. I was not quite sure what was happening back there because that was a bold proposal. It was almost heresy because it breaks with the compromise that was reached in 1974.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen). (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time. Mr. Speaker, before voting today on the two rules for this so-called conference agreement, I urge my colleagues to think carefully about the way this legislation has been brought to the floor. It is a stretch to call this a conference report. Conferees were not even appointed until yesterday, and their only job was to bless an agreement that had already been worked out behind closed doors and dropped on our doorstep this morning. Little information has been released to Members and staff. The only source of information available to most of us has been leaks in the press. Now, after that process, it takes two rules, not one, two rules to bring this conference report to the floor. Why? Because, under normal House rules, a two-thirds vote is necessary to consider a rule on the same day that the Committee on Rules reports it. To get around this sensible, long-standing, vitally important rule of the House, the Committee on Rules met late last night again and passed a rule to waive its own rules. That is the first vote. This chicanery clears the way for a second rule that allows consideration of the so- called conference report. Now, regardless of where my colleagues stand on this bill, and it has merits and demerits and pluses and minuses, regardless of where they stand, I do not think anybody, for the sake of this institution, should vote to condone this abusive process regardless of where they stand on the bill. A significant part of this bill is CBI-NAFTA Parity, or CBI Parity for short. That means duty-free, quota-free access to the U.S. market for apparel and textiles assembled in 25 countries in Central America and the Caribbean. They are already the second largest exporter of textiles to this country, taken as a group. The last time CBI Parity was on the floor was in 1997. It came to the floor under suspension of the rules. We argued then that it deserved a full, fair, and open debate. And we prevailed. It went down 182-234. And, for the same reason, it ought to go down today. The easiest way to defeat it is to vote against this rule and make it come up at a later time when we have had a better chance to look at it. This CBI Parity was bobtailed onto this conference report even though there has been no conference on it. As such, there has been no vote on it in committee not recently, certainly not on the floor, no full and open debate. And we will not have a full and open debate today because it is a conference report, we cannot amend it. The more I learn about this agreement, the more I think there are some pluses and things in it I can be able to support. But why we are we being able to vote on major trade legislation without any language to examine, without even 24 hours to see and expect a conference report? I cannot believe this is a way we treat any legislation let alone major trade legislation that is bound to speed up job losses in the textile and apparel sector where the job losses are severe already. These industries are suffering under a flood tide of imports, $65 billion in textile and apparel imports last year, yet they still employ hundreds of thousands of Americans. I think we owe these folks at least a fair hearing. I think we owe these employees, these workers, a full examination of this bill that is going to have far-reaching effects on their livelihood. Let me just say that there are three things we ought to ask when we look at this bill. First of all, will it work? Will it do what it purports to do? Secondly, whom will it help? And thirdly, whom will it hurt? I would urge my colleagues to consider the consequences. The complicated provisions of this bill, such as I have been able to read, in my opinion, will not be possible to enforce. As it is, Customs is hard pressed to track whole goods in the apparel sector. This agreement will require that Customs track knit apparel formed in the Caribbean of U.S. yarn subject to a cap on the total level of square meter equivalent imports. For Africa the agreement would require verification of the amount of regional and nonregional fabric used in the production of apparel in qualifying African countries. How do we tell the difference? Does anybody believe that these rules are going to be enforceable? I do not. And I have worked on textile apparel trade issues for the 18 years that I have been in Congress. As subcommittee chairman, I have held hearings, I have visited the major ports of entry, I have talked to the Customs inspectors, I have drafted legislation dealing with labeling and transhipping. And I can tell my colleagues, the complex and arcane rules in this bill cannot be enforced. The second question, who is it going to hurt? I will tell my colleagues who it is going to hurt. It is going to hurt about a million textile and apparel workers. They are already, as I said, suffering on an onslaught of $65 billion of imports last year. They are going to be hit even harder by imports coming in duty-free and quota-free from Africa and the Caribbean. But these imports will not be made in Africa. They will be made in Asia, I am convinced, and shipped through Africa. They will be relabeled maybe in Africa, but they will be made in Asia. So who gets hurt? Sixty percent of U.S. apparel workers are women. Thirty-five to 40 percent are minorities, mostly African American. That is who it will hurt. And finally, who will it help? It is not going to help anybody. It is not going to help the Africans because of transhipment. Read the bill, to the extent that my colleague can. Consider the process. And vote against this rule.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott). (Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Weygand).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 6\1/2\ minutes. (Mr. SPRATT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, this budget resolution was not produced until late last night; and this morning, we found it on our doorsteps. Some Members who have had only a cursory opportunity to look it over may think, well, they have touched it up here, tuned it up here. This resolution runs better than the last vehicle that left the House. But before my colleagues buy it, let me suggest we look under the hood. It is true that, in this resolution, they have mitigated the unrealistic reduction in nondefense spending that they assumed in the last one, but it is only at the margin. This resolution still requires $121.5 billion real reduction in nondefense discretionary spending. This is not just another number among hundreds of numbers in the documents before us that we can hit or miss with impunity. This whole budget turns on this unrealistic assumption. If we do not attain it, if we do not cut nondefense discretionary spending by 9.8 percent, on average, over the next 5 years, there is no surplus. There is no debt reduction. The budget is in danger of being in deficit again. This chart right here in technicolor tells us why. For the last 5 years, if we look on the far side of the chart, we will see that, even though we had a deficit during much of that period of time, and even though we had spending caps on discretionary spending, under Republican dominion here in the House and the Senate, nondefense discretionary spending still grew by 2.5 percent above the rate of inflation. Now, what we are asked to believe in this resolution is that we can reverse that trend, and in an era of surpluses, not deficits, and without any spending caps, because there is no mechanism for enforcement here, no spending caps extended in this budget, no sequestration, with no enforcement mechanism, we can go from 5 years with real spending growing 2.5 percent a year to 5 years where it declines 9.8 percent on the average over 5 years. I do not believe it will happen. I am not saying it is not possible. I do not believe it. It puts the budget in peril if it does not happen. Look, tax cuts, same thing. The last time this budget was on the floor, they were proposing a tax cut of at least $200 billion. Here I have to say I think our Republican colleagues listened. Because we came to the floor of the House, and we took their spending numbers and their tax cuts, and we combined them, integrated them into one chart over 5 years. We show it by a chart here in the well of the House that, if this budget were adopted in 1 year, the surplus would vanish, it would be wiped out in 1 year. We challenged our colleagues to counter if we were wrong, and they never countered. They never corrected the numbers. When the debate closed, our chart stood. I said, and I think the analogy is appropriate, they are going to put the budget on thin ice. No cushion. If anything happens, any reversal in the economy occurs, we are back in deficit, borrowing from Social Security again. Well, this budget resolution is a bit less risky. That is because, instead of having $200 billion in tax cuts, it has $175 billion in tax cuts. But here is the bottom line on this chart. We have redone the chart. Look at the bottom line. One will see the numbers are very, very small. There is precious little cushion left, if my colleagues pass this resolution, for any kind of downturn in the economy or for the eventuality that $121 billion in real reduction and discretionary spending simply cannot be attained. Let me tell my colleagues one other thing that is risky about this budget. There is a certain slight of hand here, as the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis) called it a minute ago, it is a dirty little secret. Last year, we had a 10-year price tag. Last year we very honestly ran out the projections of the budget, including the tax cut, over 10 years. This year, we only have a 5-year projection. Why is that? Because in the first 5 years, the tax cuts seem much, much more modest. This budget, unlike last year's, only goes out 5 years, and it seems that we have got $175 billion tax cut. But if we run that over 10 years, and if we use the same rate at which last year's proposed tax cut expanded, by our calculation, the total tax cut with debt service adjustment is $929 billion, and look what happens. It is a small number, yes, but we are back in the red again. This budget brings back the deficit. That is why we say it is risky. After all we have done to get rid of the deficit, that is why we say it is risky. Let us take Medicare. The gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) here said, what are they reading? I will tell the gentleman what we are reading. We are reading their budget resolution. It has got two different paragraphs. Section 214 and section 215, they say different things. A conference report is supposed to reach agreement between the House and the Senate, but the Senate has one provision and my colleagues have another provision. Instead of using this time-honored device we call reconciliation, one tool that is unique to the Committee on the Budget to get something done. What do they do? They say, here Committee on Ways and Means, here is $40 billion we are putting aside in reserve fund if you can use it, if you can come up with a prescription drug bill and structurally reform Medicare, then you can report a bill at some particular point in time. No dates are named. Go back to our resolution, and we show one how to do it. So we do a prescription drug benefit. We say to the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on Commerce, go do it. I do not have time to go through the other details. We have not had time to do it in a budget resolution. But let me tell my colleagues something, look at military health care. We tried to put a little bit of money in there to do something for the retirees, $5.4 billion over the next 5 years. Do my colleagues know what they provide? $400 million. The Speaker was here talking about education. Well, we looked up the numbers on education. We have got $4.8 billion for next year. They have got a cut in education below a freeze for next year. Health care, which the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kasich) was talking about. Look at function 550. They are $900 million below a freeze. We are above a freeze for health care. So for all these reasons this budget resolution ought to be voted down. It ought to be sent back to a real conference where we can do debt reduction, do tax relief, do realistic spending levels, do Medicare prescription drugs, extend the life of Medicare and Social Security. We can do it better, and we ought to do it better. Vote this resolution down.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton). (Mrs. CLAYTON asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen). (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, this is another rule that was passed late at night to bring to the floor a conference report that, in all due respect, does not deserve the name. It is hard to call this a conference report when nobody has conferred. We have had no consultation. There is no mutuality in the process, so it is not hard to believe that there will be no mutuality, no common ground, in the final result. I am not just saying this because I am miffed at being left out of the process. If you cannot take rejection, you better not be in politics. But we set a model 3 years ago for how to do this. We sat down and tried to negotiate a common agreement, given the fact that we have a divided government, and, when we got to the end, it was a pretty good product. We called it the Balanced Budget Agreement of 1997. We have not had such mutuality, such collegiality, since, and certainly not in this result here. As I said, I am not miffed, but we have meritorious arguments to make. We made them on the House floor, we made them in the committee markup. I am not sure they were heard in either place, but if we could have made them in conference, I think we could have improved this product, because in conference if we had had a conference, we would have said you are asking for $121.5 billion now in real reduction and budget authority for non-defense programs over the next 5 years. Is this realistic? Let us look at the last 5 years that have gotten the attention in conference. Let us look at the last 5 years. The reduction in the increase in the last 5 years was 2.5 percent. That was a time when we had caps, spending caps. That was a time when we were coping with the deficit and trying to reduce the deficit. Now we have surpluses and no spending caps, because that is one of the omissions of this bill, it does not reset the spending caps at all. It simply assumes, with no enforcement mechanism, that we can achieve what we have not achieved over the last 10 years, $121.5 billion in real reduction in our defense spending. Too bad we did not have an opportunity to look at that argument realistically in conference. This bill calls for $175 billion in tax reduction. We showed on the House floor how if we do $40 billion for Medicare and a $200 billion tax cut, we will wipe out the surplus in 1 year and thereafter have a zero balance, no cushion whatsoever. In case there is a downturn we are back in deficit. We are back into the social security count, putting the budget on thin ice, perilously close to deficit for the next 5 years. They have mitigated that. I think they maybe after all read our chart, and mitigated that to the tune of $25 billion. They say they want to pay down the national debt. That means over 5 years we will pay it down by $12 billion by our calculation, over 10 years by $1 billion. Why is that? What looks like a more moderate tax cut than last year, what looks like a moderate tax cut, a tax cut of $175 billion, over a 10-year period of time works out to a tax cut of $929 billion, by our calculation. Last year the tax cut was $156 billion over 5 years, and $792 billion over 10. This year, if we do $176 billion, the outyear implications are $929 billion of revenue reduction plus debt service adjustment. It literally puts us back in deficit. But they conveniently did not run the budget out 10 years, in this case. That is another thing we could have done in conference, give us a 10-year run-out of the budget, not a 5-year run-out, because in the second 5 years it becomes harder to defend. These are some major issues we did not touch on. We certainly did not touch on Medicare and prescription drugs. There is a time-honored tool that is put in the Budget Act in 1974 that the Committee on the Budget uniquely can use. If it wants to see something done, it can say to the committee of jurisdiction, you have the authority and the obligation, and here is the money to report out a prescription drug benefit by a date certain so that the House can vote on it. But every time we mention that, they dodge. This bill right here not only dodges again, because it does not have reconciliation mandates in it. This particular resolution does not even resolve the issue. There is $40 billion for Medicare reform and prescription drugs if the Committee on Ways and Means gets around reporting such a bill, and then in the Senate, there is a totally different prescription. The idea of a conference report is to bring the two bodies together. On this most critical issue, which is at the top of the chart, they fail to do it. We do not have a clear course and we do not have a mandate to get it done. I know what we will hear today is the budget resolution is on time, we are going to pass it by April 15. I am going to tell the Members what I said last year, it is on time for a train wreck that will be coming in September. That is what this budget resolution will do for us.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm). (Mr. STENHOLM asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt).

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price).