Making further continuing appropriations for the fiscal year 2005, and for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I think before we move forward on this, it is necessary to clarify a few things and ask a few questions.

We are here because a provision was included in the omnibus appropriation bill that allows the chairmen of the Committee on Appropriations or their agents access to IRS facilities and tax return information that may be housed within those facilities without apparently adequate protection for the privacy of taxpayers. Most Members did not know this language had been included. So far as I know, I have yet to meet a single Member who knew it. Certainly I did not know the language had been included.

This is a serious problem, and it raises the question, why did it happen. It seems to me there are three reasons for that.

First, there was obviously not enough time to review the bill. This bill spends over $380 billion of taxpayer money. It is over 3,000 pages long. The IRS provision is six lines in the middle of it all. It was not filed until 1 a.m. on Saturday morning. Unless they have come down today, there is still no official GPO print of the document. It was not available in useful electronic form until Tuesday.

Despite the fact that this issue was briefly discussed on the House floor in a relatively obscure way during the colloquy between the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Young) and the gentleman from California (Chairman Thomas), it was only thanks to the review of the legislative language by Senator Conrad's staff that we discovered the problem. That alone suggests Members should have had more time to review the bill.

Second, the pressure from the majority party leadership to complete action and adjourn was overriding. To meet the timetable of that leadership, staff worked all night for several days in a row in an effort to finalize the omnibus bill as quickly as possible; and as a result, corners were cut.

Third, this provision is not the only problem with the omnibus. There are important policy issues that were placed in this bill that were never voted on in either Chamber. Some of them are reasonable and some of them most certainly are not.

There are also a number of other important provisions that were dropped at the insistence of the Republican leadership, even though they had been supported by majorities in both Houses. In neither case were Members of the House given sufficient time to become aware of them or to fully understand their significance.

I include the following examples for the Record.

Some examples of problematic provisions added include:

Limits on judicial review of timber sales in Alaska;

Removal of the wilderness designation for areas of Georgia;

Extension of grazing permits without legally required

environmental reviews;

Allowing use of wilderness in ways that are banned under

current law [other examples to follow].

Some examples of items that were dropped include:

Language related to contracting out;

The bipartisan Chabot/Andrews amendment would have

prohibited road building in the Tongas National Forest in

Alaska to support non-economically viable timber sales;

The provisions that would ease the economic embargo and

travel restrictions on Cuba;

The Sanders cash-balance pension plan amendment that would

have protected American workers who are covered under

traditional pension plans from unfair conversions to cash-

balance plans; and,

The MILC reauthorization.

Mr. Speaker, in addition to these examples, I think it is important to understand that there were still other problems with this legislation. The full policy impact of funding cuts, for instance, were obscured by the manner in which the across-the-board cut effectively hid the real funding levels for a number of key programs.

For all of those reasons, that is why I said during floor debate the following: ``As the press finds out more and more about what the impact is on various programs, I think the Congress is going to wish that we spent considerably more time dealing with this in a rational manner.''

Now, some of those problems could be avoided if the House adhered to rules that are meant to give Members time to review legislation before they vote on it. But the majority leadership has almost routinely set aside those safeguards. I agree with Senator Conrad's statement yesterday, echoed by comments yesterday and today by the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), that that must change.

But in the final analysis, an even more important reason for this fiasco is the way the House majority party leadership has systematically sought to minimize accountability for their decisions by hiding those decisions until after the election. From day one the majority party leadership ran this House in a way that guaranteed that appropriation decisions would be hidden from the public until after the election.

Congressional Quarterly wrote this 2 days ago: ``Appropriation bills are the only measures that are traditionally open to free-wheeling amendments in both Chambers. But in the Senate this

year, seven of the 13 measures were never put to a minute of floor debate.''

Continuing to quote CQ: ``That may have limited the right of Senators to try to change the legislation, but it was of great benefit to the majority leader, who did not have to tie up the Chamber for most of June and July allowing Senators to offer amendments, and it was further evidence that the GOP leadership had every intention all year long of compressing most appropriations into one bill.'' So says CQ.

Now, why did they do that? Because the Republican leadership knew that they could not sell the appropriations bills to moderates in their own caucus in the other body before the election.

Congressional Quarterly pointed out: ``In the omnibus Senate VA appropriations subcommittee, Chairman Bond had to slash $3 billion from the VA-HUD bill that advanced unanimously earlier through the Appropriations Committee in September. Senator Specter likewise had to use budgetary legerdemain to make his bill more politically attractive until it was rolled into the omnibus and pared back. `The amount we have been given was not adequate,' Bond said.''

Mr. Speaker, to avoid these controversies, these bills were packaged together. The main reason for this problem is political, not procedural. Staffers are being blamed; but as a practical matter, staffers were forced to produce legislation under impossible circumstances. The majority staff presented language that had not been properly vetted. The minority staff did not catch the fact that the majority had inadvertently dropped language that would have protected the privacy of American taxpayers.

As a result, the Congress has egg on its face, the majority is disgraced, the Committee on Appropriations' ability to conduct oversight still has not been addressed because legislative language will be dropped rather than fixed, nobody wins, and the Nation has less confidence in the competence and honesty of its institutions.

One measure of how badly this institution is suffering is the level of distrust and suspicion that now permeates both Chambers. It has become hard for some to believe what I want to believe, that this was an unintended mistake that resulted from lack of time for Members to meet their responsibilities and lack of sleep on the part of the staff that had been pushed to the point of exhaustion.

I have been told, for instance, that two members of the appropriations staff actually fainted during a readout of the energy and water bill because they had been up for more than 2 days in a row without sleep. That would not have happened if the House and Senate had passed its bills under the regular order and conferenced them one by one with no ``doomsday'' deadline.

It is one thing for Congress to wind up putting numerous appropriation bills into a broad-based omnibus bill because legitimate controversies have delayed the compromises necessary to pass those bills. It is quite another thing to produce this kind of end-of-session chaos by design.

This should be a wake-up call to the majority party leadership to change practices and procedures to prevent this type of credibility and accountability problem in the future. Most of all, it is a wake-up call to reestablish trust, by recognizing that adherence to normal rules and respect for the rights of the minority do not just protect the minority, but the majority as well.

If Dick Bolling, the legendary former chairman of the Committee on Rules, were around today, he would say, ``Let's stop the bitching and get about the fixing.'' That is exactly what we ought to do. But the problem is that in the old days, we actually used to have conferences. Every member of every subcommittee used to meet with members of the other body in conference and they would thrash out the differences. As a result, Members took pride in the fact that they all knew what was in the bill, even if the other body largely relied on staff. Today that difference is gone. Today it is apparent that even people who are in charge of producing the bill are not fully aware of what is in it because of the rush and because of the lack of an orderly procedure.

We need to go back to the time when we were having real conferences with the other body so that we could legislate rather than simply impose policy decisions that are predetermined ahead of time in the majority leadership's office.

Mr. Speaker, further reserving the right to object, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui).

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I will be very brief. I would just like to make one point. A fair amount has been written about how the responsibility for this mistake lies with congressional staff. I want to simply make the point that the staff was ordered to produce an appropriation bill by a certain deadline. And so they performed in an astoundingly enervating way in trying to meet the deadlines that they were ordered to meet and they worked to the point of exhaustion. And when people do that, there are going to be mistakes made.

The reason we have rules is because it enables not just the minority but the majority as well to catch mistakes and correct them before they embarrass the institution and do damage to our system. The way to avoid mistakes like this is to prevent hundreds of pages of appropriations from coming to the floor without ever having been considered in both bodies. The way to avoid problems like this in the future is to see to it that the necessary political compromises are made at the beginning of the process in the budget resolution so that you do not have such an unrealistic set of marching orders to the Appropriations Committee that the leadership is forced to conclude that they cannot get the votes from their own troops in the other body until after they are safely past the election.

So a little less rigidity, a little less ideological zeal, a little more willingness to compromise, and a little more recognition that every Member of this body has a right to do his or her job and they can best do it when they are given the time to do it. That will mean that in the end we remake this body into what it is supposed to be, which is 435 people who are legitimate representatives of their constituents, rather than rubber stamps for whatever the leadership front office wants them to vote for on a particular day.

Reserving the right to object, Mr. Speaker, I want to say that this was not unanticipated. I rose during the consideration of the rule on Saturday and said, ``But the fear of the American people,'' referring to the bill that was to be considered pursuant to the rule that was then under consideration, ``is in the dead of the night, in the cloudiness of quick consideration that many things are included in these bills which perhaps both Houses would not have put in there, as has happened too frequently during the course of this Congress, or that either House really knows is in there.''

I said that on Saturday.

Later that day it was discovered on the floor of the Senate legislation which had been discussed in this House but the ramifications of which, the meaning of which, the effect of which was really not known. That is of great concern. The chairman of the Committee on Finance in the Senate said it was ``an outrage.'' John McCain said ``the process is broken.''

Mr. Speaker, nine of 13 appropriation bills were included in the pages of the legislation that is before me here on the desk. Now, this is approximately 1,500, 1,600 pages. The bill is actually between 3,300 and 3,400 because the bill has fewer words per page on it. Seventy-five percent of the bill which we considered, which included the language which has brought us here today, 75 percent of that bill had never been on the floor of the United States Senate, never considered, never debated, never open to the public's review. Seventy-five percent of the bill that was brought to this floor.

Mr. Speaker, the issue here today is not the granting of unanimous consent to ensure that the government keeps running until the 8th of December. We are all going to be for that. That is the appropriate thing for us to do. Nor is, in my opinion, the staff work. We have an extraordinarily excellent staff on the Committee on Appropriations, led by an extraordinary leader of judgment, of wise counsel, and great integrity who was forced, along with staff, to work in an incredibly telescoped fashion.

So 75 percent of the bills were never considered on the Senate floor, one of the bills never on the House or Senate floor, and one never even reported out of the Senate subcommittee. In addition to that, and some may not know this even at this point in time, there were three major authorization bills included in this bill that have never been debated on the floor in terms of their effect: the Satellite Home Extension Reauthorization Act, the Snake River Water Rights Act, and the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act.

My presumption is, and I have not talked to each one of the ranking members of each committee, the Resources Committee in two of the cases, Committee on Energy and Commerce in the third, my presumption is that they agreed and therefore did not object to their inclusion.

In addition to that, we deleted provisions that were approved in the House, approved in the Senate, one affecting millions of Americans on minimum wage. This House directed the conference to keep it in by a significant majority vote. The Senate adopted it. It was dropped without really any ability to discuss it, as my ranking member on the Committee on Appropriations said, in conference.

I have been on the Committee on Appropriations not as long as the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey), but a significant number of years, 23 to be specific, and was used to going to conference, to sitting at the table representing the 662,000 people I represent and saying I believe that we ought to do A or B. There was no opportunity given by this procedure to do that.

Now the sad fact is that this is not an abberation. As the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) pointed out, this is the way we do appropriation bills now. Last year we did not adopt the majority of the appropriation bills until the following calendar year; the year before that until the following calendar year, once in January and once in February. My goodness, it is November 24 today. We are doing it early, one could say.

But the fact of the matter is this has become the practice of this House, the practice of this House not to have conferences, not only on appropriation bills, but not to have conferences on Ways and Means and tax bills that affect millions and millions of Americans, not to have conferences even when we refer bills from the floor back to a conference. And we have found last year a bill being reported back that had never gone to that conference notwithstanding the vote of this House to send it to conference, and no conferee had an opportunity to say anything about the bill.

Mr. Speaker, the lamentable fact is we are here because of a process that is undermining this democratic institution. We are here because we are not taking the time to include all interested parties, including the American people, in the consideration of this legislation. We have closed rules, closed conferences or no conferences, conferences called without Democrats being included, dropping items approved by both Houses, and adding measures not approved by either House. This is unfortunate.

Mr. Speaker, as I said, we are not going to object to this unanimous consent. It is the appropriate request to make. The good news for the American people is, as the gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui) has observed, it will give us an opportunity to do something that has been vetted, that has been considered, has been considered in the open with due hearings, on television, in a bipartisan fashion, reported out, and I refer of course to the 9/11 Commission report.

This report seeks to prevent another tragic attack on the United States of America and the loss of 3,000 souls within hours, within minutes. This report was unanimously adopted. This report was passed overwhelmingly by the other body with less than four people opposing it, and it came to a conference, essentially, a meeting: the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez) on our side, a number on the other side of the aisle. The Senate came together. Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins came together and agreed and were overwhelmingly supported by their Senate colleagues. They said we have a bipartisan agreement to make America safer.

Governor Kean and our distinguished former colleague, Lee Hamilton, said we must act now. They said that in July.

Mr. Speaker, we have not acted. But as a result of what we do today, we will come back to this House on the 6th or 7th of December with an obligation to act on the omnibus appropriation bill, but it will give us an opportunity to do the right thing and pass the 9/11 Commission report which is overwhelmingly supported.

I will tell my friends in this body, I was somewhat dismayed at the Speaker's spokesman when he said that what good was it to pass a bill that the majority of the conference did not support. I will tell my friends in this House, without fear of contradiction, not one, and I invite anybody to come to the floor to contradict me, if the 9/11 Commission report is put on this floor as reported out of the Senate and as agreed to in the conference committee on this bill, it will be passed overwhelmingly in this House.

And I will say to my friend, the spokesman for the Speaker, the good is that the American people will be well served, whether or not a majority of your conference agrees. That is the good. That is why we are here. That ought to be our focus. And because of this happenstance, this mistake, this rightfully-to-be-reconsidered provision that was put in the bill without due consideration, or, if given due consideration, inartfully drawn by someone not in this body, then we will be advantaged because we will have an opportunity to respond to the American public's concern and the unanimous recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and to the support of the President of the United States who asked this to pass.

Now, Mr. Rumsfeld, our Secretary of Defense, says he is supportive of the President's view that it ought to pass. Now, if we have the President, we have the Secretary of Defense, we have the overwhelming majority, I do not know of anybody on our side of the aisle who

is going to oppose it. Maybe there are some. And I am sure that there are certainly sufficient Members on your side of the aisle to ensure 218 votes to pass such a unanimously and supported recommendation to make America safer.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from Wisconsin under my reservation.

Reclaiming my time under my reservation, I thank the gentleman for his comments and would join him in reiterating the fact that the fault lies not in the staff. The fault lies not in the objective in this particular provision that was trying to be attained. It was that a significant, very harmful mistake was made. Whoever made it made it, as the gentleman from Wisconsin has pointed out, in the press of a process which did not give time for reflection, so that, having been caught at a time when we did not then have time to correct it because the rush to judgment was in place, we now have taken that time, and I think that is a good thing. I appreciate the staffs helping us get to that point on both sides of the aisle.

I want to say, secondly, that our Founding Fathers set up a process, Mr. Speaker, that was not as efficient as authoritarian regimes claim to be. If you have the votes and you can jam something through, so be it; but our Founding Fathers, Mr. Speaker, wanted a reflective process, a process where there was full and fair consideration in both Houses, because their concern was that democracy would work if everybody had the opportunity to see it and to participate in it.

This process of thousands of pages of bills being passed within hours under a martial-law rule did not allow that process to occur, and the result was inevitable, that things would be passed unknown to this body, unknown to the American public and of great concern to them which would not have enjoyed a majority of support in this House or the Senate if they had been fully aired.

Hopefully, this will be an object lesson which will lead us to a process more open, more open to minority views, with time given to staff and Members to digest, to reflect, and to make wise judgments.

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Speaker, we actually had quite a week last week. The 9/11 conference came back with a bipartisan solution with the two Senators and obviously the two House Members, both Democrats and Republicans agreeing; and it was not brought to the floor because even though the President and Vice President supported the legislation, at the same time the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he was against it. We do not know why it did not come up, but hopefully we get some action on this.

Secondly, the Republican conference had a meeting, and they reversed 11 years of a rule that now will allow an indicted felon who is in the leadership to continue on in the leadership and not have to step aside until the matter is resolved.

Lastly, obviously, by having a bill come up, $388 billion, over 3,000 pages, and having language that basically will allow any staffer that is assigned by the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations to look at anyone's tax return. Let me tell Members what this really is all about. Talking about a tax return, if in fact that law went into place, and in spite of the little colloquy the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) had, that was irrelevant because the language of the law speaks for itself. This would have been in the law if not for the fact that Mr. Conrad caught it.

That would allow a staffer to go to the IRS in an open meeting and ask for a specific return from any individual in this room or anywhere else and open up that return, display it, give it to the national newspapers, do whatever that person wanted with it and not suffer any consequences.

The reason we actually had to tighten the law was because in the 1970s when Watergate occurred, when we had the enemies list, when we had the plumbers and all of those things going on, the wiretaps, people were allowed to go to the Internal Revenue Service and ask for returns of individual members. It was not until the mid-1970s when we tightened it up.

Perhaps members of the Committee on Ways and Means, or their designees, particularly the chairman of the committee, can in fact obtain tax returns of companies, corporations, and obviously individuals. But before that happens, one has to have an executive session so it has to be properly noticed. Executive session, as my colleagues know, is a closed session. If any of the information in those documents should be released to the press or to the public or to anyone else, it is a felony offense with up to 5 years in prison, $5,000 fine, and other sanctions. That was as a direct result of Watergate.

Here now in the dark of night without any notice a provision was slipped into this bill, a $388 billion bill, to basically allow staffers to look at anyone's return without any criminal sanctions.

I have to say, I know there is a discussion about what happened, why it happened and what was the purpose of it; but what is really troubling to me, I do not believe an IRS agent or one of the IRS employees wrote this provision. Had they been asked to write the provision, they would have based it upon how the Committee on Ways and Means would obtain that information. They would not have written it so broadly. One of the most important things an IRS employee will tell you is they protect tax returns of individuals, companies, and nonprofit corporations. So there was more to this.

I have to say in conclusion here, the real problem I see is the fact that as long as we are not given notice, as the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) says, as long as there is not a give and take, this problem is going to come up more and more. We ought to be happy that the other body saved us from a massive embarrassment, because the reality is had this become law, there would have been some time over the next few years when someone would have abused that process and someone's returns would have been disclosed to the press.

Mr. Speaker, I regret that some have misinterpreted section 222 in the omnibus bill. The administration had requested an unprecedented increase to hire additional staff for the IRS's processing and enforcement activities. Because of this more than $500 million increase in funds, the subcommittee felt it necessary to conduct proper oversight. The provision was simply an attempt to exercise our constitutional stewardship of the IRS's budget request, with no intention to review or investigate individual tax returns. This intent was clearly communicated in a colloquy with the chairman of Ways and Means Committee during Saturday's floor debate.

In order to allow oversight of these funds without infringing upon individual's privacy, the subcommittee requested that IRS draft the language. Two days prior to the bill being considered by the House, 17 staff members from the House and the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, read through every word of the subcommittee's bill and report. Clearly, there was never any desire to access personal information and it's unfortunate that some have misrepresented and exaggerated the purpose of this language. Nevertheless, I support the removal of the provision to end the confusion surrounding the issue.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Appropriations be discharged from further consideration of the joint resolution (H.J. Res. 115) making further continuing appropriations for the fiscal year 2005, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration.