Mel Watt

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably detained on August 3 and was not present for rollcall vote No. 618. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no'' on rollcall vote No. 618.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong, vigorous opposition to this bill and title III, and I rise today to protest the [[Page H 8339]] shortsighted cuts included in this mean-spirited bill. In an effort to frantically balance the budget on the backs of poor and middle income families, Republicans have completely lost sight of those important, cost-effective programs which work well. One such program is the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. This program is not welfare. Each State participates in this program. It reaches more than 5.8 million people nationwide. Last year, the average benefit for the 452,000 recipients in my home State of North Carolina was $91. Seventy-nine percent of these recipients have an average income of less than $8,000. In many cases this was the safety net that kept the poor and elderly from being cold or freezing to death. Who are these people, you might ask. In North Carolina, almost 64,000 households have recipients over the age of 60. Almost 60,000 households have recipients who are children under the age of six. And over 36,000 households have recipients who are disabled. How can we expect these people, whose annual income is less than the poverty level, to survive these vicious cuts? These cuts border on being criminal, Mr. Chairman. If they're not criminal, they're certainly irresponsible. We should not penalize these people because they are poor. Yet that is exactly what we are going to do by passing this mean-spirited bill. In this body, we have a tendency to get caught up in arguing over numbers and lose sight of the people whose lives depend upon these programs. This program is a success. Let's not let the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program become another victim in the Republican numbers game. This program will not break the Government but it will break the little comfort and will of the 452,000 recipients in my State who depend on this program. I urge every Member of this House to reject this bill.

Mr. WATT

Mr. WATT. Reserving the right to object. Mr. Speaker, and I will not object, I am advised by the Democratic leadership that they have consented to the request. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the amendment under consideration.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support of the Stokes-Boehlert amendment and in strong opposition to the attempts to insert 17 unauthorized legislative provisions into the VA-HUD and independent agencies appropriations bill for fiscal year 1996. I am deeply concerned about the attacks being waged on the legislative process. This amendment is not only about preserving environmental, clean water and clean air laws but about safeguarding the integrity and proper functioning of the legislative process. None of the 17 legislative provisions in this bill has been reviewed or recommended by the authorizing committees with jurisdiction over those Federal programs. Historically, appropriations bills deal with money and do not include legislative provisions. However, this bill ignores this history and violates this process. It represents an outright attack on the integrity of the legislative process we normally follow in this House. There are good, compelling reasons that the House established authorizing committees and appropriating committees. The authorizing committees are charged with responsibility for taking the time to study, deliberate, review, and write laws which create and implemented Federal programs. The appropriating committees are charged with recommending levels of funding and appropriating funds to carry out programs. The legislative provisions in this bill represent a gross intrusion into the jurisdiction of the authorizing committees. This bill circumvents the process. The Stokes-Boehlert amendment helps correct this abuse and circumvention, I, therefore, encourage my colleagues to support the amendment.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Chairman, I definitely want to get this straight. We are talking about enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. That is the act that talks about providing housing on an equal, nonracial basis. If people cannot get insurance on the property, they cannot get the loan, and so I am not quite sure how the gentlemen who keep professing that this has nothing to do with equal rights and civil rights, and that HUD has nothing to do with insurance because it deals with housing, how they think HUD could adequately deal with fair housing when insurers are discriminating, and people cannot get housing without insurance, so how are they supposed to deal with their job under the Fair Housing Act? Mr. Chairman, I do not get it. I cannot understand what this argument is all about. If that were the case, why would it even be necessary to put this provision in the bill? We are striking a provision, this amendment would strike a provision in the bill which prevents HUD from using any money to enforce the insurance laws having to do with fair housing. Therefore, if it did not have anything to do with housing, what is it doing in the housing bill? I do not understand this argument.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Chairman, I have been sitting here and listening to this debate on the housing part of this bill for the last 2 to 3 hours, and getting more and more distressed, and, to be honest, very saddened by what we are engaged in. There is not a person in this body who does not own a home. Most of us own two homes. We have a home here in Washington and a home in our home districts. I am told that some of us have three, and four homes. In addition to our Washington home and our district home, we have a mountain home and a beach home, and all of us get a tax subsidy for the interest that we pay on those homes. Notwithstanding that, we are here depriving people, the most vulnerable people, of a place to live. Well, I cannot understand what we are doing. I do not understand what it is we are trying to achieve. How can we expect to improve our Nation and the things that our Nation stands for when a significant number of our citizens do not have access to any housing, much less one, two, three or four homes? How can we expect to achieve our destiny as a nation when many of our people are living on the streets? We have got Members of Congress who are sleeping in the buildings here, even though they can afford homes. We do not let homeless people come into our buildings and sleep here, but our Members can get that tax free. And we take advantage of it. So what are we doing here? We are passing a bill that cuts $400 million from public housing operations. That means that the housing authorities in my district, which are barely functioning now, cannot do an adequate job of maintaining and preventing deterioration of the housing stock that we own as the American people. We are cutting $1.2 billion in modernization funds so that people continue to live in these rotting, terrible housing conditions, in a nation that is prospering. We are cutting the drug elimination program, wiping it completely off the books, at the time when drugs are spreading, and they are particularly spreading in public housing and around lower income neighborhoods. These are the funds that our housing authorities, those in my congressional district, have used to try to beef up security and do some drug training with the young people in the neighborhood to keep them out of drugs and get the police to come in and do joint efforts with them, to try to attack this devastating problem. And we are cutting out the money for the homeless people, the most vulnerable people in America. I want to urge my colleagues, please consider what we are doing and vote against this bill and in favor of the Vento amendment.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. I rise in strong support of the Hastings amendment. I want to remind my colleagues that this is about the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Equal. This is not about affirmative action. This is not about setasides. This is about enforcing the law to make sure that people are treated equally in this country. Instead of funding the mechanism in our country that is designed to ensure that, we have allowed equal employment opportunity to become a joke. Three hundred twenty-eight days behind in their processing, 97,000 cases in backlog, and we say that we want to stand for equality in this country. I remind my colleagues, this is not about affirmative action. It is about equal treatment under the law.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, this provision would permit the subdivision in my congressional district, known as Pineview West subdivision, to be eligible once again for financing for the 502 program which was just discussed in the prior amendment. This was an eligible rural area as of the 1980 census. As a result of the 1990 census this still-rural area became a part of the standard metropolitan statistical area, and so it lost its designation as a rural area that would qualify under the 502 program. Last year in the 103d Congress I offered this amendment which was adopted by the House Banking Committee in the housing reauthorization bill, and the housing reauthorization bill of course passed the House last time but was not acted on by the Senate. This would not add any additional money. It would simply allow this one subdivision to compete along with other rural areas for 502 funds, and I ask the support of my colleagues.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I offer a privileged motion.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I object.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I am just wondering what good does it do to do reform of the rules if they then turn around and violate the rules that they have reformed. I do not know what good that does.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. My distinguished colleague, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Volkmer] ended his presentation with a quotation from the distinguished American, Will Rogers. I want to start mine with another quotation from another distinguished American, Yogi Berra. Yogi Berra said, ``This is deja vu all over again,'' and that is really what I want to talk about, because this is deja vu all over again. You have not seen me on the floor recently very much. Earlier in this term, during the first 100 days, I rose time after time after time to protest procedural shortcomings that my Republican colleagues had engaged in. They want to take credit for all of this reform, yet they do not want to comply with their own rules that they are taking credit for among the American people. Let me give you some examples. On the opening day of this Congress, my colleagues passed a new rule which bars proxy voting in committees. They argued that proxy voting makes a mockery of the committee process and concentrates power in committee leaders. Well, I happen to agree with them. So what do they do on a regular basis in committee? We cannot vote by proxies, but anytime a vote comes out in a way that they do not like, then they simply go back and ask for reconsideration so that when their Members are not there, they always have a fallback position to come back in and get the results that they are looking for anyway. They talked about the value of proxy voting. Well, I believe in no proxy voting, too. I think it makes for better deliberation to have the Members in the committee doing work. But they also passed a rule on the opening day of this Congress which talked about waiving the 5-minute rule in the House. Well, what is the 5-minute rule in the House? We debate things on the House floor under a 5-minute rule, and they passed a rule which says you cannot have a committee meeting while we are under the 5-minute rule in the House. Well, just about every day we have been in this session of Congress, my colleagues, after they passed that rule, have come back to this House of Representatives every single day and asked for a waiver of that rule so that committees can continue to meet while we are doing debate, important debate, right here on the floor. There was a day last week when I had two markups going, one in the Committee on the Judiciary, one in the Committee on Banking and Financial Services, and a bill that I was involved in on the floor right here, and they said, ``Well, you can be in three places at one time because we waived the rule that allowed the committees to meet even though we are doing something that is important to you on the floor of the House of Representatives.'' Well, let us hasten along to talk about why this is deja vu all over again, because my colleagues on the Republican side also on opening day passed this rule, and it says, ``No Member of the House can serve on more than four subcommittees of this House.'' Well, look at the record, if you will. There is not a single Democratic Member of the House of Representatives who serves on more than four subcommittees, because the rule says that. But look at my friends on the other side of the aisle, 30, 30 Republican Members are violating this House rule. Two-thirds of the Members who violate this rule are the same freshmen Republicans who came into this House saying they support reform and honesty with the people of the American electorate, but they themselves will not abide by their own House rules that they have adopted. Well, is it deja vu all over again? Let me make the other points, as I have got only 2 minutes. They passed a rule on opening day of this House which said that the Congressional Record will be a verbatim transcript of what actually happens in the House. Well, my colleagues have not complied with that rule either. They have come right back and, on numerous occasions, have changed, changed the transcript of what has happened in the House to reflect what they would like to have happened rather than what actually happened. Well, one final thing. They said on opening day, and they went out into the public and took credit for it as an important issue of reform, that a three-fifths vote, a three-fifths vote is required, to pass any new taxing provision. But on several occasions my colleagues have come into this House and violated their own rules. So why is this deja vu all over again? Because it is a systematic practice on this side of the aisle to come in and violate the rules of the House and have us try to sanction their own violations. I say to my colleagues, if you are going to take credit for reform, then at least live up to the standard that you set for yourselves. You ask us to comply with the law. We comply with the law. You asked us to comply with the rules. We complied with the rules. All we are simply asking you to do is to comply with the very same rules that we must comply with that you are telling the American people that you are complying with, and, if you do that, then maybe you can have a better audience in the future.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I yield back to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. I was just going to inquire what the gentlewoman did during the April recess when we were out for 3 weeks and you all seem to have spent all your time parading around bragging about what you did in the first 100 days; why did you not do it during that period?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I have risen many times in this cherished Hall in defense of the Constitution of the United States. I do so again today. Our flag is but a symbol of our democracy, but our democracy and the freedoms which make it unique and strong are not defined by a symbol, but by the guarantees in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Most of those guaranteed freedoms often do not enjoy a majority support. In some cases, they were written into the Constitution to protect them against the majority. That is what makes our democracy unique. That is what makes America America. What do we gain by protecting the symbol if we fail to protect the rights it symbolizes? The supporters of this amendment will argue that they are the true patriots, but where were these patriots when the constitutional principles of our democracy were under attack during the first 100 days of this Congress? Where were these patriots when we voted on the language of the fourth amendment? Mr. Speaker, I come from North Carolina, a State that refused to ratify the U.S. Constitution until the Bill of Rights was incorporated into it. It is a State that recognized in 1792 that our fundamental rights were so important that they had to be delineated in the charter of this Nation. Today I stand in support of that same charter, and I stand patriotically in support of that same charter.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. But this is not on the bill. Under what authority would he have the right to close? This is a unanimous-consent request.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, under what authority would the gentleman have the right to close on a unanimous-consent request that was divided?

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. WATT of North Carolina

Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably detained on Wednesday, May 24, and was not present for two recorded votes on the bill, H.R. 1561. I wish to have it included in the Record that had I been present, I would have vote ``yes'' on rollcall vote No. 354 and ``no'' on rollcall vote No. 353.