Providing for consideration of the joint resolution (H.J. Res. 73) making further continuing appropriations for the fiscal year 2004, and for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

(Mr. FROST asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, the new deficit numbers came out yesterday, and they confirm what we already know: this Republican government has given America the biggest government deficit in our history, nearly $400 billion in fiscal year 2003, the year just concluded, plus an additional $500 billion deficit in fiscal year 2004, the year we just started, according to the Bush administration.

Mark my words, these Republican deficits will end up raising taxes, and worse, raising our children's taxes. The Republican leaders are going to do everything in their power to hide their abominable record of fiscal mismanagement.

Just listen to the Bush administration's Treasury Secretary in today's New York Times. He predicts that this jobless recovery will somehow magically add 2 million new jobs before next year's elections. He is saying this economy, which has lost nearly 3 million jobs since President Bush took office, the worse job records since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, is now going to create 200,000 new jobs a month. Perhaps the Bush administration still believes in Santa Claus, and perhaps they really believe that 2 million jobs will magically appear under the election Christmas tree next year; but the American people know a snow job when they see one. And make no mistake, they are seeing one today on the House floor.

Mr. Speaker, this so-called continuing resolution is a procedural shell game to hide Republican mismanagement of the government. This is not trick or treat, Mr. Speaker, just tricks. This entire process today makes clear that this is a Republican government that refuses to do its job, at the same time that too many hard-working Americans are still suffering from the Republican recession. While millions cannot find any jobs, Republicans refuse to do the job that they have and that taxpayers pay them to do.

As my Republican friend on the Committee on Rules, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Goss), once said about another continuing resolution, ``Congress is failing to fulfill its obligations in a timely and responsible way, choosing to fall back on one CR after another instead of putting in the time to do our jobs.'' Or as he said another time, ``a continuing resolution erodes the credibility of the Congress.''

After misleading the American people for too long, neither this Republican Congress nor this Republican administration has much credibility to erode anymore. And as for ``putting in the time to do our jobs,'' this Republican Congress hardly even bothers anymore. This House has not put in a full week's worth of work in months. And this week we are not even going to be here for 24 hours. It has gotten so bad that this resolution is the only so-called substantive legislation before the House this week, and everyone knows that it will not actually do anything. It is just a procedural shell which they will use to hide from the taxpayers the massive omnibus spending bill that they are going to sneak through this House later this year. And mark my words, when this resolution comes back to the House in its massive and bloated form, you will not even recognize it.

My friends in the majority will tell you that the House did its work. They will tell you that the other body caused the problem they are addressing today with this shell game. Mr. Speaker, they want Americans to forget one simple truth. The Republican Party controls the Senate just like it controls the House, just like it controls the White House and the entire executive branch. And Republicans refuse to use that power for the people still suffering from the second Bush recession and the third Republican recession in the past 20 years. For example, some 1.4 million Americans have been unemployed so long in this economy that they have exhausted their unemployment insurance. After the end of this year, Americans who lose their jobs, people like the nearly 3 million jobs lost since President Bush took office, will not be able to enroll in unemployment insurance. But Republicans refuse to help them before this Congress closes up shop for the year. Some will say that Republicans are simply incompetent, that they cannot figure out how to run the government. That would be bad enough. But I do not think it gives the Republican Party the credit it deserves, because this Republican government can be ruthlessly effective when its priorities are involved. Unfortunately for the American people, the priorities of this Republican government are largely limited to the political priorities of the Republican Party.

Mr. Speaker, time and again Republican leaders have proven their willingness to use their power over the government to get more power for the Republican Party. As the Washington Post suggested last week, Republicans are creating an almost Soviet-style system. They treat the people's government as just another arm of the Republican Party.

Republican leaders have moved heaven and earth to protect big corporate tax dodgers, but they will not give military and working families the same tax credit that they gave to the wealthiest. Just last week, House Republican leaders twisted enough arms to block a Democratic pay raise for the military which would have given soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan a $1,500 bonus, but they cannot be bothered to do anything about high health care costs. And earlier this year Tom DeLay's office used Federal resources to track down his legislative opposition in Texas, and even urged the FBI to arrest the Democratic State legislators who dared to stand up to him. But now House Republican leaders will not use the Federal resources of the Congress to help the millions of Americans who need unemployment insurance in the midst of President Bush's jobless recovery.

Mr. Speaker, this is not a government of the people, by the people and for the people. It is a government of the Republican Party, by the Republican Party and for the Republican Party. And if the Republican Party wants this Republican government to raise the debt tax on Americans, while at the same time shortchanging education and veterans' health care, then they should at least have the courage to be honest with the public about it.

So I urge my colleagues to oppose this rule. Do not help the Republican leaders keep Americans in the dark this year.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

(Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), a member of the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey), the ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. Speaker, once again we are being asked to pass a resolution that keeps the government open because Congress has not finished its work on appropriation bills. That is not unprecedented. Many times in the past we have faced this situation. But I do think that it is harder to understand when we have one party in control of all of the tools of government. When one party is in control of the Presidency and both the House and the Senate, it ought to be somewhat easier to get the work done on time. Over the past 34 years, one party has been in control of all three of those power centers, the Presidency, the Senate and the House, 6 years. The average number of appropriation bills that had been passed by the time the fiscal year ended in those 6 years was twice as high as it is today. Today we have only three appropriation bills passed. That, in my view, is no reflection whatsoever on the majority leadership of the Appropriations Committee. I think if things were left to the committee, we would be much further along the road. The reason that we have not completed our work is largely because the majority party leadership in this House has determined that they only want to pass appropriation bills on the majority party's side of the aisle.

The majority party has a right to define itself and lay out what its first preferences are. The minority party has a similar right and obligation. But then both parties, in the end, are supposed to seek a way to resolve those differences. I recognize, being a member of the minority, that the majority party is likely to, and under our system is entitled to, win most of those fights. That is the way the system works. But for the good of the system and for the good of both parties, there

are some occasions where the issues are so tight that you can use a little help across the aisle.

And it is the obligation of the minority party to try to do that if and when some legitimate compromises are made, not so that the minority party wins the argument on those bills but so that the minority party can at least feel that some of its concerns have been modestly attended to. That has not been the case in this Congress on appropriation bills and outside of the appropriation realm.

I, for the life of me, do not understand why we do not have bills on energy and water before us, why we do not have the military construction bill before us. On bills like that, those are relatively simple bills. They are normally fairly noncontroversial, and on bills like that what we have today is the majority in a fight with itself, and so far it has not been able to triumph. So we are stuck with those bills in limbo. On the labor, health, education bill, which I had hoped would be passed on a bipartisan basis eventually, we are stuck because the majority party is insisting on a fairly extreme approach to that bill.

The administration asked the Congress to vote for No Child Left Behind. We did. But now the funding for No Child Left Behind is being left behind.

The bill that we have on labor-H is some $7 billion short of where it ought to be in order to meet those promises.

And then we have similar problems with respect to the Commerce- Justice-State bill where efforts are being made to pretend that more money is being provided to local law enforcement than in fact is being provided because to understand what is being provided, we have to compare both homeland security and regular crime funding.

So, Mr. Speaker, I would simply say that we could be a lot further along if there was any indication whatsoever that there would be a conciliatory approach coming on any of these bills from the majority side of the aisle. Even outside of the appropriations process, we see efforts made to really radically change Medicare in the prescription drug bill, whereas if people were to back off of that, we could easily pass a decent prescription drug bill.

So I would say, I used to think we had a good shot at getting out of here by November 1. It is obvious we are going to be very lucky, Mr. Speaker, to get out of here by Thanksgiving. I regret that because I think the longer the Congress is in session, the more damage is being done to the Republic. But because of these disagreements we will be here next week with another continuing resolution. The Members can bet on it. I just hope that sooner or later the majority party recognizes that in the minority they have a willing partner in passing some of these if they are willing to compromise in the slightest on some of these issues before us.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, every year this House has a responsibility to pass the 13 appropriations bills that fund the activities of the Federal Government. Once the House passes those bills, the United States Senate is supposed to pass them. After that, the House and the Senate get together on a conference committee to resolve the differences between the two versions. Those final bills are passed and then sent to the President for his signature. This is all supposed to happen before the fiscal year ends on September 30.

I think it is important to review this material from the perspective of a ninth grade civics class because the Republican leadership seems to have forgotten it. Despite the fact that they control the House, they control the Senate, they control the White House, they even control the courts, they cannot seem to get their act together and do the people's work. So we are forced once again to pass a continuing resolution.

It used to be that the Republicans blamed President Clinton for all the delays in legislation. They really got good at blaming him for everything. In fact, I think they kind of miss him. I know I do because the economy was so good and the budget was in surplus. Now, the economy under their leadership is lousy, and we have record deficits. In fact, we have the largest deficit in the history of the United States of America. Then the Republicans used to blame the Democratic Senate for everything. That excuse is gone now, too. We are here for one simple reason. The majority of this House has failed. They did not do their job. They do not want to do their job. And the American people deserve to know that. And what is really amazing is that the House is in session for a day and a half this week. It is Tuesday and this is the last day of business scheduled for the week. I am not sure about other parts of the country, Mr. Speaker, but in Massachusetts, a workweek is generally 5 days and sometimes it is longer, given that in this economy, people have to work sometimes two or three jobs. I doubt that firefighters or steelworkers or teachers or accountants in my district could skip work on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and expect to get a full paycheck.

The American people deserve a Congress that functions, that does the job given to it by the Constitution and they are not getting it. We all know what is going to happen in the next few weeks. We are going to see some huge, omnibus bill that a few people in a back room have worked out over pizza and cigars and be told that it is a fait accompli, take it or leave it, all because the leadership cannot or will not do their jobs. They did not do their job on the Iraq supplemental because we were not allowed to debate and vote on amendments, amendments that would have paid for the package, as opposed to adding $87 billion to the national credit card burdening our children and our grandchildren with debt.

This continuing resolution represents failure and not progress. But failure, Mr. Speaker, has become business as usual around here. Mr. Speaker, we are supposed to be a deliberative body. We are supposed to debate issues. We are supposed to amend bills to make them better to represent the concerns of our constituents. Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, we have a leadership in this House that does not believe in democracy, that does not believe in open debate, that does not believe in the deliberative process. We have a Committee on Rules that kind of acts like the State of California. It does not believe in debate. The fact of the matter is under the Constitution, this is supposed to be a deliberative body. We should debate issues regarding education, regarding unemployment, regarding the economy, regarding health care, regarding things that matter to our constituents each and every day. Yet under this process, we are just kind of kicking the ball down the field and we are told we are going to put this off for another day. And when we put it off, it is going to come back to us in a huge package and no one is going to know what is in the bill.

This process is broken. The American people need to understand that the Republican leadership in this House is not doing its job. The Republicans wanted power. It appears they wanted power just for the sake of power. The fact of the matter is they cannot even get along with each other. This is a disgrace that we are at this moment. I would urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the rule.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member of the Committee on Rules for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, we are all going to vote for this CR; but I think as we consider it, it is appropriate for us to reflect on the allegations of mismanagement that were made over the years about how Democrats ran this House, to reflect on that and relate it to present performance and look at how well the appropriations process has been managed since the Republicans took over in 1995.

I want to look at the facts here. It is now October 21, 21 days since the start of the fiscal year, 2004, and this Congress has passed and President Bush has signed only three of the 13 annual spending bills into law: defense, homeland security, and the legislative branch appropriation bill. The Members will notice in addition that the military construction bill, one of the least controversial bills considered by this House every single year, is still mired in conference, although I would observe it is going to have maybe the distinction of being the only real conference that we have had in some period of time. If that is not indicative of this Congress's mismanagement, then I am not sure what is.

The fact of the matter is since the majority party regained the House majority, this Congress has had to pass an omnibus appropriation bill in 7 out of 9 years. That is right. In only 2 years since consideration of the fiscal 1996 spending bill did this Congress pass stand-alone legislation for all 13 appropriation bills. By comparison, and I hope everybody on my side of the aisle will note this, and the other side of the aisle, of course, will discount it and not believe it, by comparison in fiscal year 1994, that is 1993, and fiscal year 1995, that is 1994, when we had a Democratic President, Bill Clinton, and a Democratic Congress, we passed every single spending bill as a stand- alone piece of legislation, every one, which meant that we could fully debate and not hide anything in those bills.

Mr. Speaker, the Members of our side of the aisle can hardly wait to hear what excuse is now used by our colleagues on the majority side for failing to complete the appropriation work on time. It is going to be tough to blame poor Senator Daschle who was the scapegoat last year when not only did we not pass the fiscal year in the year in which we were supposed to, we had to go to the next year and did not pass most appropriation bills until January of the following year. They certainly cannot blame the Democrats on this side because we do not make many decisions on this side.

So what is their excuse? We all know what the truth is, and it is not that the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), the chairman of our committee, or anybody on the committee has mismanaged the appropriation process. It is the direct result of the majority party's inability to agree with itself. It is an affliction that is not just holding up the appropriations process. It is also preventing us from passing an energy bill, from extending the child tax credit to 6.5 million working American families, and from giving our seniors a real prescription drug benefit that is not designed to destroy Medicare. The truth is we have not completed our work on time and the majority party is the only group that is responsible for this failure.

Mr. Speaker, we will vote for this continuing resolution, which is an admission and a perfect example of not getting the work done that the American people expect us to get done on time and for their benefit and for the benefit of this country.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 407, I call up the joint resolution (H.J. Res. 73) making further continuing appropriations for the fiscal year 2004, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

(Mr. YOUNG of Florida asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, the legislation before the House, H.J. Res. 73, is the second continuing resolution for fiscal year 2004. As you know, the current CR expires on October 31, 2003. This bill will extend the CR through November 7, 2003, but more importantly it will provide a vehicle to address the remaining six appropriations bills that have been passed by the House but that have not been passed by the Senate as of today.

These bills are the following: the Agriculture appropriations bill; the Commerce, Justice, State and Judiciary appropriations bill; the appropriations bill for the District of Columbia; the Foreign Operations appropriations bill; the Transportation and Treasury appropriations bill, and the VA, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill.

Section 4 of this CR, H.J. Res. 73, will consolidate these six bills for the purpose of finishing the remaining appropriations bills. As you are aware, the House has passed all 13 regular appropriations bills and last week passed a supplemental appropriations for fiscal year 2004.

Three very important bills have already been signed into law, the Defense appropriations bill, the Homeland Security appropriations bill, and the Legislative Branch appropriations bill, which was also the vehicle for a supplemental appropriations for natural disasters and forest fires. We continue to move forward on conferences with the other body on four bills that they have passed.

We hope to have the conference reports for Energy and Water, Military Construction, Interior, and Labor and Health and Human Services ready for House consideration as early as next week.

Mr. Speaker, I believe the CR itself is noncontroversial. I urge the House to

move this legislation through the Senate so the government can continue to operate smoothly and efficiently so that we can come closer to finishing our regular appropriations bills.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) and the committee for all of the support and the cooperation that we have had. As I have said numerous times on the floor, with the cooperation of the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) we have managed all of our bills well on time to have concluded by the end of the year. But we are only one House of the Congress.

We will work with our partners in the Senate to conclude this business of appropriations as early as we possibly can.

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

Mr. Speaker, I urge that we pass this CR and get the process moving, and I yield back the balance of my time.