Floor Statements

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, as the gentleman from Texas knows, I have a great deal of respect for him. He and I do not agree very often, but I think that he is a very thoughtful watchdog in this House, and I appreciate the fact that he is suspicious of government overreach wherever it comes from.

Having said that, I want to echo the words of the gentleman from Minnesota. If you think that we are going to be able to sell our meat products on international markets without eventually having a system like this, you are smoking something that ain't legal. It simply is not going to happen. To defend the ability of our producers to export, we are going to have to have a decent animal ID system. We are also going to have to have a decent animal ID system in order to protect the public health of our own citizens. So we need to have this go forward.

What the committee is doing is recognizing that the Agriculture Department has handled this issue so badly that they have given incompetence a bad name. And what the committee has therefore done is to say that until the department gets its act in order, there will be no funds provided, but we leave the possibility open for funding once they get their act together. That is the responsible way to force the agency to quit jerking farmers around. I mean, it is like watching a tennis game; bump, bump, bump. They change their mind every 5 minutes. You cannot keep your eye on the ball. One day they have one approach; one day they have another. And as a result, farmers are frustrated, consumers are confused, and taxpayers are bilked for a heck of a lot more money than this system ought to cost. We would not even be having this debate today if USDA had handled this in a fashion which was in any way competent, but they did not. So now we pay the price with debates such as this.

I would urge that the House support the committee in this position. It is taking the responsible path on this issue. And I would urge that we turn down the amendment even though I fully appreciate the frustration that lies underneath the actions of the people who have offered the amendment today.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I come from the State of Joe McCarthy, and he was famous for his use of innuendo. I don't appreciate it when I hear innuendo on this floor from any source.

Let me start this way: my opinion of earmarks is pretty clear. When I was chairman of the Appropriations Committee, for instance, we had no earmarks in the Labor-Health-Education bill. I think the number of earmarks has gotten grotesquely out of hand. I think it is beyond the ability of our staff to police. On that, I agree with the gentleman. But I don't think that we need to drag in a reference to an obscene player in the game like Mr. Abramoff in discussing a specific earmark such as we were discussing 5 minutes ago.

If one is serious about providing oversight on earmarks, then they would not have voted for the budget resolution to begin with, if they were serious about fiscal responsibility, I should say.

If they were serious about fiscal responsibility, they would not pick and choose a few random earmarks to go after on the floor. They would have insisted that this House have systematic reform of earmarks so that, for instance, we go after the big targets, the authorizing committee. The committee that provides highway authorization, for instance.

The mother of all earmarks was the ``bridge to nowhere.'' That wasn't in an appropriation bill. That was in the authorization bill, and that authorization bill last year, the highway bill, had seven times as many earmarks as the relevant appropriation bill, seven times the amount.

If people were serious about going after earmarks, they would go after authorization earmarks. If they were serious about earmarks, they would go after tax bills. The 1981 tax bill was replete with special transition rules for corporations, and every time I would talk to a big businessman who would complain to me about the deficits that Ronald Reagan was building up, I

would say, ``Well, why don't you raise hell about what they are doing in the tax bill?''

``Oh, we can't, because we have got a special transition rule in there and we don't want the committee to take it away,'' they would say.

If you take a look the 1986 tax bill, the same problem. If you take a look at the most recent tax bills, laced with special privileges. And the fact is that those special privileges aren't just 1-year affairs, as a lot of appropriations earmarks are. They continue giving again and again and again, as the TV commercial goes.

So I would say if the gentleman has legitimate objections to specific earmarks, by all means, it is his right to raise that on the floor. But I think if the gentleman wants to be taken seriously on this effort in the House, then he needs to support a systematic and systemic approach, which will reduce the number of earmarks to a number which this House has the capacity to handle.

I don't think that we particularly add to the effort if we just pick and choose on the basis of, say, funny names. I recall once, for instance, when a Senator from will my own State, Bill Proxmire, made fun of an earmark for a research project because it was research on Polish pigs, and everybody laughed about Polish pigs. But the fact is, out of that study came a new blood pressure medicine, which has been used by millions of Americans for years.

So I would suggest there is a constructive way and a not so constructive way to go after earmarks. I would prefer we follow a constructive road.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I was not going to say anything on this point until the gentleman made his last remark about people taking earmarks away if they do not vote for a bill.

I do not recall a single Member of the majority party helping me when, 2 years ago, I urged Democrats to vote against the Labor, Health and Education bill because it was grossly insufficient to meet our education and health care and science needs. I well recall when the Republican Appropriations Subcommittee chairman announced to his entire caucus that, because not a single Democrat voted for that inadequate Labor bill, that no Democrat was going to get a project.

I am proud of the fact that Democrats stuck against that bill anyway because we saw our duty as requiring us to oppose that bill because it put cuts for millionaires ahead of increasing the Pell Grant for kids trying to go to college. They put tax cuts for millionaires ahead of funding health professions training. They put tax cuts for millionaires ahead of worker protection programs.

So I would simply say, I welcome the gentleman's finally saying tonight that it is improper for earmarks to be used as internal blackmail. I just wish he had spoken up when we actually faced that issue 2 years ago.

I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. Chairman, well, with all due respect, the issue before us tonight is not what happened to past appropriations bills. The issue is whether or not, since the gentleman has chosen to take on these particular earmarks, the issue is whether or not the earmark in question merits support or not.

I recognize the gentleman is trying to do what Otto Passman when he ran the Foreign Aid Committee, which is to offer amendments for illustrative purposes, but the fact is, tonight the House is not going to be making judgments on whether there should or should not be earmarks. The House, under procedures tonight, is simply being asked to make a judgment about whether a specific earmark is meritorious or not, and I would hope that that is the basis upon which they would cast their votes.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I will repeat again, I think that congressional earmarking has gotten way out of hand, but having said that, I want to challenge the idea that somehow every project that is funded by an agency downtown is pure, and every project selected for funding by a Member of Congress is impure.

I want to give you one example. A few years ago, when Mitch Daniels was still head of OMB, he put out his so-called pork list, and leading the list in an attempt to embarrass me was an attack on a wind sled which I had gotten for Ashland and Bayfield in my district on the shores of Lake Superior.

That water is cold; 40 degrees in the summertime. And the OMB decided that they were going to try to trumpet this project and being an illegitimate use of taxpayer funds, so they described what was wrong with it in their OMB booklet.

There was only one problem. They had the wrong wind sled, they had the wrong model, and they described it as being a pleasure craft. In fact, here is why I got the money for the wind sled in that budget: because the local sheriff called me and told me that he had seen a young boy drown in Lake Superior who went through the ice, and the old device which they had to try to rescue the boy simply did not work. So this boy's parents stood on the shore watching their son drown just 30 or 40 feet away and they could not reach him and neither could anybody else.

So the sheriff asked me if I could please get enough funds to help them provide a decent rescue vehicle for that area, and I got the wind sled, and I am proud I did. And I think that I knew a whole lot more about the facts than the head of OMB sitting on high in his office who was simply trying to skewer a Congressman from the other party, not having the foggiest idea of why we got it or what it was for.

Now, I certainly don't defend every earmark. I have attacked a number of them in my years in this Congress. But if you are going to go after an earmark, it would be useful if you knew enough about it to judge whether or not it is a decent use of taxpayers' money or not. And I can tell you that most of the attacks I have heard on this floor over the past 15 or 20 years have not measured up in terms of knowing what they were talking about.

So I just wanted to tell that little story to illustrate that I agree with the gentleman from Idaho that all of the wisdom in government is not deposited in the agencies. And I would point out that in many instances what you have in an agency is some political appointee sitting down there deciding on project after project after project who is going to get the money, and it is not on the merits; it is on the basis of who has a connection and who has an angle. The only difference is, their process is a whole lot more invisible than the process is up on the Hill.

We ought to have improvements in the process. And if we are in the majority and if I am chairman of the Appropriations Committee, I guarantee you there is going to be a lot more discipline than there is today. But having said that, I do not think it is fair to simply pick out these projects and then move to a generalization that somehow the executive branch is always more qualified to decide what ought to happen in each congressional district.

If we aren't qualified to know at least as much about that as the anonymous bureaucrats downtown, then we indeed don't belong here.

Mr. Speaker, let me say that I think in general, within the spectacularly inadequate allocation provided the subcommittee, that Mr. Hobson and Mr. Visclosky have done a very credible job on this bill, and I especially appreciate the way Mr. Hobson has approached this bill on a bipartisan basis.

Having said that, I would hope that Members would vote against the previous question on the rule. As Mr. Visclosky pointed out, for the 25 years since Jimmy Carter left office, this country has been in a listless drift as far as energy policy is concerned. Energy conservation, energy research programs, have been funded at woefully low levels in comparison to where they were during the high point of Jimmy Carter's presidency.

The problem is that, after Carter left office, his successors, especially Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush, systematically shrank those budgets in real terms, and so today, we are paying the price in terms of scarce energy and high energy prices.

We have some choices to make. The Congress has already determined this year, the majority party has, that it is important this year to provide $40 billion in supersized tax cuts to people who make over $1 million a year.

In contrast, Mr. Visclosky would offer an amendment which would scale back the size of those tax cuts by 2\1/2\ percent and use that money instead to make greater investments totaling $1 billion more than the bill contains for flood control projects and especially for energy conservation and energy development programs.

If we had done that over the past 25 years, if we had simply kept up with what Jimmy Carter had asked us to do while he was President, we would be in a far more secure place as a Nation tonight and we would have a far more stable pricing system for energy, and we would be much further along the way toward protecting Mother Earth from the ravages of global warming.

So I would hope that the House would vote against the previous question so that we would have an opportunity to resurrect the Visclosky amendment. I do believe that it is important to ask the question: What is more valuable to the country's future, stronger levees in our communities, stronger flood control projects, an energy policy that puts us ahead of the curve rather than at the mercy of OPEC, or an even easier Easy Street for the most well-off people in this society?

I think the choice is obvious.

Mr. Speaker, this morning, I am not even going to talk about the fact that on this side of the aisle we feel that this bill is short by at least $1.8 billion in providing the kind of health and medical care that we think ought to be provided for our veterans.

But I want to talk about two other problems in the bill. Because this bill, first of all, continues the fiction that somehow it is likely, or desirable, that $735 million in additional fees will be laid onto our retired military. I do not believe that that should happen, and I do not believe that will happen. And if it doesn't, then this bill has a $735 million hole that it is going to have to fill.

Secondly, this bill has a very interesting budget gimmick that essentially allows this bill to come to the floor $500 million above the budget resolution that was adopted just 2 nights ago by the Republican majority.

Here is what happened. The administration sent down in the military construction bill their request to move ahead with about 310 military infrastructure projects. What the committee did was to designate 20 of those projects, and there is nothing emergency about those projects, but they need to proceed. What the committee did was essentially to take 20 of those projects and simply label the expenditures for those projects as being emergency.

Why did they do that? Because it then made room in the bill for the committee to add projects of their own totaling $507 million. So that is a $507 million gimmick which allows this bill to come to the floor in reality $507 million above the Republican budget resolution.

As a result of the rule which is now being brought to the floor, there will be several choices that people will have to make. Members will now be free to strike the emergency designation for those projects. If they do, then the bill has to be taken off the floor because it exceeds the budget cap, unless the committee itself moves to simply take all of those projects out of the bill. As a result, if those projects are taken out of the bill, we then have a hole in the administration request. If they aren't taken out of the bill, then we, in effect, are $507 million above the budget that the Republicans pledged their loyalty to just 2 days ago. And in addition to that, down the line you are still going to have to find $735 million to make up for the fiction that there is some possibility in this place that those additional fees ought to be laid on our retired military.

I think this is another quaint example of the majority party fealty to their own budget resolution and we are forced to encounter these ridiculous budgetary gimmicks because the majority party refused to fix the problem. I offered an amendment in committee to try to fix the problem, at least to fix the problem of the $507 million. I simply suggested that we support an amendment which would cut the size of the tax cut for people making a million dollars, and they are going to get a $114,000 tax cut this year. We simply suggested that if you can cut the size of that $114,000 tax cut by 1,400 bucks, you could pay on the square, without any gimmicks, for that $507 million.

That is what we should have done. But the majority party thought that it was more important to deliver a $114,000 tax cut to millionaires than it was to play straight with the budget process and to play straight with their own budget resolution and to play straight with the American people.

Very interesting. Very interesting.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, as I indicated earlier in the debate, 2 days ago, the Republican majority passed a budget resolution which imposed a stringent ceiling on total appropriations for the year. The effect of that was to squeeze more than $1 billion of badly needed money out of this bill.

What the committee has tried to do in response is that the administration in this bill asked for about 307 military construction projects, items like barracks and the like, and the committee essentially took 20 of them and designated those as ``emergency spending'' and that freed up $507 million so that the committee could insert a number of projects which represented their highest priorities. That meant that the bill was effectively, if you are going to look at it in terms of budget accounting, $507 million above the amount allowed by the budget ceiling.

That didn't even take into account the fact that the committee is proceeding on the assumption that a good number of additional fees which the White House wants to impose on veterans might, in fact, go into effect. I don't believe they will. We don't deal with that issue in this amendment, but we do deal with the first issue.

What we are simply suggesting is that we recognize that these projects requested by the White House are necessary, but we believe that they ought to be paid for. So what we suggested in committee and what I am asking on the floor is that we simply limit the size of the tax cut which is scheduled to take place for people who make over $1 million, we are suggesting that we shrink that tax cut from $114,000 on average for a person who makes over $1 million, we are suggesting we shrink that by about $1,400.

That is hardly going to lay a glove on the most wealthy people in this country, but it would enable this bill to proceed with honest accounting, meeting high-priority needs of the military at various bases throughout the country and the world.

So, Mr. Chairman, it is very simple, if you think that we ought to proceed with the military construction priorities laid out by the administration, and if you think that we ought to pay for those, then you would support this amendment.

If you do not, then you would oppose it. I would suggest this is a fiscally responsible way to meet critical military needs, and I would hope that the House would see fit to approve the amendment.

Point of Order

Mr. Chairman, I was here when the Budget Act was passed. And the purpose of that Budget Act was to reconcile spending with taxes to try to reduce the deficit.

So the purpose of the Budget Act is to try to see to it that appropriations, direct spending, and revenues all mesh in such a way as to reduce, to the greatest possible extent, the deficit.

That means that if this House takes an action on the tax side that provides large tax cuts, and if that action then imposes on the Appropriations Committee the requirement for deep cuts, that means that the two are, in fact, integrally connected.

It is hard for me to understand how a supposedly conservative party can take the position that we should proceed under the Budget Act to act in a way that pretends that what we do on the revenue side is irrelevant to what we do on the spending side.

This amendment, in my view, is within the spirit of the original intention of the Budget Act. Unfortunately, I must concede that under the way this House is being run these days, and under the rule under which this bill was brought to the floor, I must concede the point of order.

Mr. Chairman, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Chairman, if this point of order is upheld, does that mean that the House would be placing a higher value on the ideological accounting contained in the budget resolution than they would be on meeting the critical military needs of the country?

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I think it is important that we not personalize this issue. I do not like the fact that these gentlemen are evidently going to be knocking out funding for these important military projects. But I do think it is important to recognize that under the budget resolution which was imposed by the House Republican majority, and under the rule that was voted for by virtually every Republican today, they have that right. That is a parliamentary fact.

So I disagree with the judgment being made by the gentleman. But in all fairness, I think that the responsibility for this debacle lies squarely at the feet of the Speaker and the majority leader and the majority party leadership, because they broke arms for 3 weeks to impose a budget resolution on this House which required the allocation to the subcommittee which wound up being $824 million below the amount proposed by the President.

Because the majority party leadership decided that it was more important to provide $40 billion in tax cuts to people who make $1 million a year, because the majority party leadership decided that it was more important to provide over $60 billion in tax cuts to people in the top 1 percent of our population who make more than $400,000 a year, because the majority party leadership decided that those priorities were preferable to meeting our education needs, our health care needs, our military construction needs, and our science needs, then the Appropriations Committee is stuck with the dirty job of carrying out those mandates. And under the rule that was imposed by the Rules Committee, which is appointed on the majority side by the Speaker of this House, every last one of them, because that rule was voted on by that leadership ordered and dominated committee, that is the reason that these emotions are in order. And to avoid that, that is why I tried to offer the previous amendment which said: Look it, this is a phony accounting gimmick. Let us be honest about it and pay for it by scaling back those tax cuts for the most well off in this society by just a smidgeon.

So I think, if we are going to start passing out responsibility, this is not the responsibility of Mr. Lewis, it is not the responsibility of the gentlemen who are going to be offering the points of order, although I think their judgment is defective, but it is, in fact, the responsibility of the majority party leadership of this House. And it illustrates that Mr. DeLay was absolutely right when he said a few months ago: ``This is what you get when you elect a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House of Representatives,'' because it means there are no checks and balances in the system. It means that we have no way on stopping the majority party from putting tax cuts for the very wealthy ahead of the needs of our military, ahead of the needs of our kids, ahead of the needs of our workers and our sick in this society. This day illustrates how screwed up the priorities are on that side of the aisle.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I did not vote to go to war in Iraq. Most of our friends on the other side of the aisle did, but after the Congress voted to send our troops to war, the troops did not ask, is this an emergency or is it regular order of business? They just went. They did their duty. Some of them have done it two and three and four times in Iraq.

I do not know why they should be stuck in the middle of a family squabble within the Republican Party in the Congress, a squabble between people who put tax cuts for the most well-off people first versus the people who put budget accounting nicety first versus people who think that there are some economic and social needs faced by the families of those soldiers.

What the committee tried to do is to cut it down the middle, hedge a little bit here, a little bit there. We do not like that on this side of the aisle. So we tried to substitute honest accounting, and the majority party insisted on knocking that amendment out on a point of order.

So at this point, we have to choose between a faulty accounting system or meeting the needs of the families of people who are in Iraq defending the national interests of this country; and while I have great misgivings about the advisability of having gone to war in the first place, I will be doggoned if I am going to stand here and allow somebody else's squabble about whether a budget item is an emergency or not get in the way of providing the school needs, the barracks needs and the other needs of the families in the military, who are not asking questions of their government; they are just doing their duty.

So I congratulate the gentleman for his comments, and I think that this day, I was going to say it is a sad day in the history of the Congress, but it is not because this finally illustrates what we have been trying to demonstrate for 3 years, that what you do on the tax side of the budget, what you give to Mr. Raymond and his friends, is directly related to what you have left on the table that you can give our military families, our school kids and people in this country who need a little help on the health care front. It is about time that people on the majority side of the aisle recognized that connection.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman, but I think I have said enough. I just would hope that this House would reconsider what they have done this week and use this incident to recognize that that budget resolution is simply insufficient to meet the needs of our military, the needs of our school children and a number of other seriously competing needs.

I would hope, and in fact I fully expect, that the Senate will not pass the budget resolution that has caused this problem.

The irony is that the Republican majority in this House had to pass a let-us-pretend resolution yesterday, which said we are going to move ahead with appropriation bills on the assumption that the full Congress had passed the budget resolution, which it has not done, because Republican moderates in the Senate recognize that the budget resolution that is being enforced on the majority side in this House is too extreme for their taste in the Senate.

Senators such as Senator Specter have already made that quite clear.

So it is ironic that a budget that hasn't even passed the Congress is being used to enforce these kinds of trade-offs. I don't think the American people are going to be very pleased.

I thank the gentleman.

I thank the gentlewoman.

I am sorry the gentleman wouldn't yield to me, but if he had, I would have asked them this question: He said ``we'' are engaging in sleight of hand. I just wanted to ask him who that ``we'' was. Because this report was put together by his own party. It was brought to the House floor by his own party. We on this side of the aisle tried to correct that faulty accounting and we were not allowed to do that by the majority party either.

So I just want to make certain that people understand that in this case the ``we'' is ``thee.''

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I am somewhat amused by the fact that the last two times Mr. Edwards has tried to fully explain to the House what the impact of the point of order was that those who are responsible for the points of order tried to urge the Chair to cut off Mr. Edwards so that he could not, in fact, explain it. Let me simply say if I were offering these points of order, I would want to have as little discussion about them as possible also. I would not want to have them fully aired either.

Let me just make the point. I find it interesting that we have Members of this House objecting on bookkeeping fine points to what the committee has been trying to do to provide these facilities and services to our military, and they stand in high dudgeon about the fact that the budget resolution is being exceeded.

Yet I do not recall them objecting when the President has submitted to the Congress almost $400 billion in expenditures for Iraq, none of which has been submitted in the regular appropriations order. All of those requests have come in the form of supplemental appropriations, off budget, if you will.

So I find it interesting that we can fight an entire war, spend $400 billion in an off budget, hide-the-cost-from-the-public fashion, and yet when it comes to meeting these small construction needs, and as the gentleman points out, this is not in the United States, this is in the Middle East itself. My understanding is that one of the items affects the special ops unit, and yet the gentlemen feel that their ideological commitment to their precious budget resolution, which they cannot even sell to their compatriots in the United States Senate, ought to be the be all and end all above every other economic or social or moral consideration. I find that, indeed, very interesting and very revealing.

Parliamentary Inquiries

Mr. Chairman, parliamentary inquiry.

Doesn't this whole thing illustrate that there are some people here who are much more concerned about the technical niceties of the procedures of this House than they are on the human implications of what it is we do here?

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, as I was sitting here, it struck me that the gentleman from Texas resembles a poor imitation of Vice President Cheney because, like Vice President Cheney, he is shooting at the wrong target. The first rule of thumb is that if you are going to shoot somebody or something, you make sure you are shooting the right person.

What the gentleman just said to us is almost unbelievable. I mean, it sounded to me like I was in a sophomore high school class rather than in the House of Representatives, which is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world. We are told that because he was peaked about a hydroponic tomato project in a bill last year that somehow he was determined to take it out on the military by yanking out military construction projects that were asked for not by me, not by Mr. Walsh or anyone else, but by the President of the United States.

I do not have any projects in this bill. I have a district that has very little to do with military except with respect to the Guard, and almost all of them are stuck in Iraq. So I can speak objectively with respect to projects. But it does seem quaint to me that if the gentleman did not like something that happened in another bill in another year in the deep, dark, distant past that instead he is going to shoot the future by yanking out money that the President of the United States thought it was important enough to ask for. I think that says something about the judgment of the persons making these motions today.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I will only take 1 minute. I just want to respond to something the distinguished majority leader said. He indicated that what had occurred on the House floor today was a process fight.

That is not what it was at all. It was a priorities fight. We saw this unraveling today because the majority party insisted on sticking by a budget resolution which puts super-sized tax cuts for the most comfortable in this society ahead of every other consideration.

We may not see arguments quite as dramatic and as chaotic as we did today on this bill, but as appropriation bills move through this House, we will see similar conflicting priorities, because the budget which has caused the problem is a budget which does not put the needs of military families first, it does not put the needs of education first, it does not put the need to invest in critical programs that strengthen the economy of the country in the future first. Instead, it continues to insist that we provide over $40 billion in tax cuts to persons who make over $1 million a year. That is a priorities fight. It is not a technical process fight. I think we need to keep that in mind.

I thank the gentleman for the time.

Mr. Speaker, today, the House of Representatives enters the land of make believe. Since April, the majority party has been trying to pass its misbegotten budget resolution, and they have had a very difficult time doing that because their more moderate Republican brethren in the Senate have regarded the budget pushed by the majority party as being extreme, and it is something that they don't want to take home to their constituents.

Last night, in a very interesting kabuki dance, the majority party managed to finally find the votes some more than a month late to pass their budget resolution in this House. But it still has not been passed by the Senate, and I think objective observers feel it is not likely to ever pass the Senate.

So now we have a problem. The appropriations bills are not supposed to move forward until we have a budget resolution passed by both chambers in place. So what do our friends on the majority side of the aisle decide to do? They use this rule to deem as passed the budget resolution which they have not been able to pass. In other words, the rule says ``Let us pretend that in spite of the fact that the Congress hasn't passed its budget, it has.'' That is what we are doing.

And so I think that is reason enough to vote against this bill and this rule. Unless, of course, you think it is right to provide $40 billion in tax cuts to people who make over $1 million a year, while at the same time we are cutting needed domestic programs such as education, health care, science, and environmental protection by $13 billion below the current service level. Unless you think, of course, that it is perfectly justifiable to cut the clean water revolving fund by 50 percent, as this bill will do, at the same time that you are giving the wealthiest 1 percent of people in this country who make over $400,000 a year $64 billion in tax cuts. The average person making over $1

million a year will get a tax cut well over $100,000.

If you make $42,000 a year, the tax break that you are going to get in the bill that the majority passed last week is about 80 cents a week; but if you make over $1 million, your tax cut is going to be as large as the entire salary of that person who made $42,000. I don't think that is the kind of budget that I want to take home to my constituents.

So I would say the underlying bill itself is bad enough with what it does to the clean water revolving fund, the way it shreds land acquisition programs, the way it hems in EPA's ability to enforce the law against polluters, it is bad enough to vote against as is. But when you add to it this ``Let's Pretend'' fiction that the House has passed a budget which it hasn't passed, it therefore becomes an endorsement of that budget. I don't think the American people want that budget. I certainly don't want that budget. I intend to vote ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I don't intend to object, but I do want to point out to each and every Member that if this unanimous consent agreement is accepted by the body, the way I count it, that means that we will go to about 12 o'clock tonight before we begin to vote. I ask that Members remember that as they are entertaining their enthusiasm for offering a number of these amendments tonight. It just seems to me that Members need to know that this is going to take a long, long time; and we would appreciate it being shortened by people whenever it is possible to do so.

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I offer this amendment simply to have an opportunity to comment on what has just transpired on the House floor.

My great mentor and friend through most of my public life has been Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, and perhaps the greatest environmentalist who ever served in the United States Senate. Just before he died, I had my last conversation with him about environmental issues, and he made quite clear that he thought the greatest environmental threat to mankind over the next 100 years was the issue of global warming. And it is time this Congress face up to that fact and does something about it.

I don't know what it takes to have this government get off its you- know-what and start dealing with the most critical environmental problem that confronts the entire planet. If we just take a look at a few of the pieces of evidence that are lying all around: core drillings in glaciers around the world enable us to study bubbles that go back as far as 300,000 years, and we see that we have a higher concentration of carbon dioxide than we have had in the known history of the planet.

Since 1970, the duration and intensity of hurricanes has increased by 50 percent, the number of tornados in this country has now reached the highest number in recorded history, some 1,700 in one year. Two hundred western cities have broken heat records in the past 2 years.

Glaciers, which are serving really as the proverbial canaries in the mines, are trying to tell us something. Twenty-seven of the 38 glaciers in Glacier Park are gone, and the rest of them are likely to be gone before this century reaches its halfway point. The Larsen ice shelf, 700 feet thick, was expected to last 100 years; it suddenly began to collapse in two weeks. The Arctic ice cap has lost half of its thickness in the last half century. The Greenland ice cap, as was referred to on that side of the aisle earlier, is melting at a highly accelerated rate. And, if it goes, one third of Florida goes with it. It will be underwater. If it goes, it could shut down the major Atlantic Ocean current. The current that drives the gulf stream has already decreased 30 percent in 50 years, and that is driven by differences in temperature and salinity of the water.

So this to me is not just an environmental problem; it is a moral problem. It isn't going to affect my generation. All of you who are in my generation are going to be gone within 20 years. But it most certainly is going to affect our kids, it most certainly is going to affect our grandkids. And I would hope that we would demonstrate that we

care more about the welfare of the planet than we care about committee jurisdictional dung hills.

But what is apparent today is that this Congress is going to be prevented from making a simple statement of fact that humans and human activity are driving, at least significantly driving, the problem of global warming and that we have an obligation to do something on the national level and the international level to deal with it, and we have an obligation to do it now.

John Sawhill, who served a variety of Republican administrations in a variety of capacities, said this just before he died: ``In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.'' And I think we ought to remember that when we think of this issue.

To me, I think we need to remember what those who were present saw in 1933 at FDR's inaugural when he took the oath of office on the very steps of this Capitol. He is remembered mostly for saying that ``we have nothing to fear but fear itself.'' But the line that got the greatest reaction from the crowd at that time was when FDR said, ``We need action, and we need action now.'' We most certainly do. And I regret very much that the gentleman felt it necessary to knock out this language. If he is going to do that, then I would suggest that the authorizing committees have an obligation to sit down with the White House and begin immediately, not 6 months, not 6 years from now, the real process of producing actions that will indeed save this planet from what is most assuredly going to occur if we continue the drift that is implied by this action today.

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

Yes.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I knew we still had charter members of the Flat Earth Society walking around this country. I didn't realize there were quite so many in the United States Congress.

The rules don't allow me to say who I was referring to.

The gentleman says we should have studies, we should have hearings. Your party has controlled this Congress for 14 years. The time for studying is over. The time for studying is past. There is a huge scientific consensus that human beings are driving global warming. And James Hansen from NASA has told us that in his view we may have less than 10 years to deal with this problem before we hit a critical tipping point beyond which we will be facing catastrophe.

He may be right, and you may be right. If you are right, then moving to deal with this problem costs us very little. If he is right, not moving costs us everything. The gentleman refers to an ice age.

If you shut down the ocean currents' conveyors, you are going to have an ice age in one heck of a hurry. So I would suggest the gentleman has committee responsibilities. If he does not want this committee to meet our responsibilities, as we have tried to do, then it is about time you meet yours and actually do something about it rather than denying that this is a real problem.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

I would simply say to my good friend that just about the only scientists left in the world who do not recognize that this is a serious and real problem are

those who have an economic interest in not recognizing it, and that, in my view, is an absolute fact.

The gentleman talks about not wanting to fall into a trap. What you are going to fall into if we listen to the gentleman is sea levels 20 to 30 feet higher than they are now, and virtually every coastal city in the world is going to be under water, and New Orleans is going to be the norm rather than the unhappy exception. That is what the world is going to face if we do not deal with this problem and begin to deal with it while we still have time.

Mr. Chairman, how much time do we have remaining on each side?

Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver).

Mr. Chairman, let me yield the remaining 2 minutes of my time to the distinguished gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks), who was the originator of the language which was stricken.

Mr. Chairman, I yield for the purpose of a unanimous consent request to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Udall).

(Mr. UDALL of New Mexico asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, I want to congratulate the gentleman from Alaska. He always does the best job possible in selling a very bad case.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I won't take much time. The Republican bill before us is based on the assumption that the Senate has passed the House Republican budget resolution. It hasn't. This amendment is based on a more responsible assumption.

It is in conformance with the Spratt budget amendment. It adds roughly $800 million for restoring the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. We add $50 million to the EPA budget to protect local water supplies from terrorist attacks. We add $300 million for our national parks, refuges, and forests. We provide $150 million to provide some key land acquisitions at Valley Forge, Acadia, Grand Teton, Mount Rainier and a number of other purposes.

We pay for it with a modest 2 percent reduction in the tax cuts expected for millionaires. It would reduce the size of their tax cuts by about $2,200.

I would hope that no one lodges a point of order on this amendment so we could have a more constructive approach to these programs.

Point of Order

Mr. Chairman, I reluctantly must concede the point of order. I would have preferred that the gentleman had not made the point of order, but given the fact he has done it, the rule under which this bill is being debated precludes the inclusion of this amendment. I very much regret that.

Mr. Speaker, for weeks we have been wondering whether the Republican moderates were going to stick to their guns when they said they knew that it was wrong to pass a budget that provided $40 billion in tax cuts for people making $1 million a year while you are squeezing the guts out of education and health programs. We now know the answer. They are doing a poor imitation of Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in ``The Wizard of Oz.'' I wish Bert were here. He would cry at their performance.

The fact is they are now selling out for a promise that if sometime in the deep, dark, distant future somebody does something to change this budget resolution, then there might be a table scrap or two left for additional education and health care. There is about as much chance of that happening as there is of the Chicago Cubs winning the pennant this year.

With respect to what the gentleman from Florida said on education, the fact is the Congress promised the States that on special education we would pay for 40 percent of the costs. Each year for the last 3 years, the Federal share of the cost of special education has been cut by budgets that you have voted for.

You talk about Pell Grants. The fact is it costs $3,400 more to go to a 4-year public college today than it did 5 years ago. The President wanted to solve that by adding $100 to the Pell Grant program. House Republicans said, no, that was too much. You cut it to $50, and then when you sent it to the Senate, you cut out the rest of the 50 bucks.

So, in 5 years you have not done one whit to make it easier for people to go to college by increasing the Pell Grants.

So do not give us your crocodile tears, and do not brag incidentally about how much you have increased education for the last 6 years, because there are $16 billion in the education budget today that would not be there if we had not dragged you kicking and screaming into supporting Labor-Health budgets that in the end were higher than the original House Republican budget.

So I do not mind if the gentleman wants to live in the Land of Oz. Just do not take us there with you.

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the gentleman from California for being able to give that speech with a straight face. I really admire him for it.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

Well, I thought you were gritting your teeth; but, nonetheless, that is fine.

Mr. Speaker, let me simply say I really regret days like this in the House because I love this institution, and I love what this institution is supposed to represent to the American people.

The public wants us to pass significant House reform. Instead, this legislation before us, in my humble view, constitutes consumer fraud masquerading as lobbying reform, and there are two spectacular examples of that.

The most egregious example of the corruption of the process in this House is the way in which conference committees have been substantially corrupted by some of the most powerful people in this body. When you have a package that does not prevent powerful people in this body from adding 30 and 40 pages of new legislation to a conference report without ever having a vote on the conference report, as happened last year on the defense appropriation bill, when you have a reform bill that still allows that to occur, I do not think that is much of a reform bill.

This bill ought to require that any time any item is inserted in a conference report, that that cannot be considered by the House unless there is an open public vote of the conferees beforehand. That is the way you prevent the pharmaceutical industry from being shielded from suit, as happened on the defense bill last year at the behest of the majority leader of the other body.

Let me also say that with respect to earmarks, this bill purports to deal with the problem of earmarks by only going after appropriations earmarks; and yet last year on the authorization bill on highways, there were some 5,000 earmarks, seven times as many as were contained in the comparable appropriation bill. To not do something about authorizing committee earmarks in the process is a joke, in my view.

And then I would point out, to not lay a glove on the special goodies that are tucked into tax bills is even more outrageous. The 1986 tax bill, for instance, included 340 separate transition rules each benefiting a small set of individuals and small, ``little'' businesses like General Motors, Chrysler, Phillips Petroleum and Commonwealth Edison. It provided special deals for sports stadiums in Tampa, San Francisco, Denver, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. It provided a special rule for a millionaire stockbroker who had the largest private collection of Rodin sculpture in the Chicago area, and a family listed by Forbes Magazine as one of the 400 richest in America.

Any bill that allows those kinds of earmarks to continue is a bill that is not worthy of the name. It is a joke. It is an embarrassment, and I would urge that this House get serious and pass real reform.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, let me say that I find this discussion rather interesting today. We have a bill before us which essentially objects to a producer from Arizona, because he is doing to California what California has done to the rest of the country with respect to milk marketing orders for quite some time.

It seems to me that if we are going to be dealing with this issue, we ought to be dealing with it generically, with all of its ramifications. I don't think this bill belongs on the suspension calendar. I think if we are going to take care of somebody's side problem, we ought to take care of other problems that are associated with the milk marketing order system as well.

What this process reminds me of is something that happened a number of years ago when Mr. Gingrich was Speaker and Steve Gunderson, a Republican from Wisconsin, was chair of the Dairy Subcommittee. Steve had expected to be able, on the farm bill, to offer an amendment to the committee product dealing with milk marketing orders. He wasn't allowed to do that,

even though he was the chairman of the subcommittee handling the bill,

Instead, what happened is that there was an insider's fix between then-Speaker Gingrich and then-chairman of the Rules Committee, Mr. Solomon. They guaranteed that in return for their sweetheart deal, Gunderson wouldn't even be able to offer his amendment on the floor.

We have seen all too much of that for the past years around here, and so I have no illusions about what is going to happen to this bill, but I for one want to object to the fact that it is on the suspension calendar. I want to object to the fact that if we are going to take care of this little discrete problem that we are not, in the process, taking care of the broader issues that confront us on the whole area of milk marketing order systems.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, yesterday, we cast a symbolic vote that got all kinds of political attention from the press having to do with the Dubai controversy. That vote had absolutely no effect on anything because the Dubai deal had already been killed. So the only thing we accomplished was letting Members of Congress get a nice vote that they could take home, stick in their pocket and show their constituents and say, ``Oh, what a good boy am I.''

Now we have got a chance to do something real about port security and about border security. Is there anybody in this House who thinks that our ports are really sufficiently secure so that we do not need to have more resources? Is there anybody in this House who is comfortable with the level of security on the Canadian border?

Over the past 3 years, we on this side of the aisle have tried nine times to get the majority to increase Homeland Security funding above the amount that you have had in your bills, and we have been turned down nine times.

This Congress is telling us, as this small chart shows, this Congress is telling the country we can afford to spend $64 billion this year to provide tax cuts to people who make $1 million or more a year. They are telling the country we can afford to spend more money on tax cuts for millionaires than we spend on the entire Homeland Security budget.

Now, does anybody really think that this country is in greater need of providing $64 billion in tax cuts to people who make a million bucks a year? Do we really think that we need to do that more than we need to shore up port security, border security and the like? With all due respect, I do not think that is very good judgment with respect to our priorities.

The Hart-Rudman report in 2002 concluded, that ``America's own ill- prepared response could hurt its people to a much greater extent than any single attack by terrorists,'' and Katrina revealed the truth of that statement. We witnessed the debacle in Katrina because communication systems went down, and the worst problem about Katrina is that no one could talk to anybody because all of the communication systems were put out of order.

Now, this supplemental only contains sufficient funds to provide an emergency communications backup capability in the gulf coast. That capability consists of trucks loaded with equipment that can be quickly moved into devastated areas to bring up cell phones and VHF, UHF and SHF radio networks to help first responders in their search-and-rescue efforts.

This capability ought to be provided nationwide. That is just one of the many examples that anybody who knows anything about homeland security understands. It is a serious challenge to the security of this country.

So I would submit that we can argue about the details, and if the majority does not like some of these items, you can easily fix them in conference because you have got the votes and we do not, but anybody who thinks it is more important to provide $64 billion in tax cuts to people who make a million bucks a year than it is to increase our homeland security capability, in my mind, has a faulty set of judgments, and I think they better think again.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, maybe I did not hear right, but I thought I heard some rather interesting things. Two speakers ago I heard the words ``we need more oversight.'' Really? This from a Congress and a majority party that has provided mighty little oversight of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, mighty little oversight on the question of contractor ripoffs in Iraq?

If you want some oversight, I will be interested to see how you vote on the amendment to provide a Truman-like committee to get into the details of contractor abuse in Iraq.

I have also heard from the gentleman from Texas express his concern about cancer patients who are being asked to pay taxes to support additional aid to the gulf. I will be interested to see whether the gentleman votes for a budget which for the third year in a row will cut the number of research grants at the National Institutes of Health.

The gentleman mentioned the number of people who die in fires. I will be interested to see whether they vote for the recommendation to eliminate fire grants. I could go on and on, but I won't in the interest of time.

So I was heartened to hear those comments by both gentlemen. I just hope that when the bills come that provide the services for the activities that they mentioned, that they will have the same attitude that they are exhibiting here today.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word, and I yield to the gentlewoman from California.

Mr. Chairman, what is behind this amendment is very simple. The gentleman would like to hold the low-income heating assistance funding in this bill hostage to drilling in ANWR. He cannot do that under the rules of the House; and so from his standpoint, the next best thing is to eliminate low-income heating assistance in general.

I was one of the three original authors of the low-income heating assistance program, along with Silvio Conte, Republican from Massachusetts, and Ed Muskie in the Senate. And I think I know something about this program and why this amendment is destructive.

Let me explain what happened last year. The House-passed version of the budget reconciliation bill included $1 billion for LIHEAP to be available in fiscal 2006. But just before the reconciliation conference was completed, the defense appropriations conference report was filed, and that contained an additional $2 billion for LIHEAP as part of the sweetener for ANWR oil leasing provisions.

Not wanting to duplicate the ANWR funds, the reconciliation conferees shifted their addition to fiscal 2007. Subsequent to that, however, the entire ANWR package, including the $2 billion appropriated for LIHEAP, was dropped out of the defense appropriations conference report.

The end result was no additional funds for LIHEAP in 2006, despite escalating heating oil and natural gas prices. The committee amendment simply tries to move the money back to where it was originally supposed to go, which was in this fiscal year. The problem, however, is that the language, even in the committee amendment, does not guarantee that that money will be spent this year; it only allows it to be.

Let me point out the gentleman says he does not think this is an emergency. The gentleman makes $160,000 a year. So does everybody in this Chamber. It is not an emergency to us. We do not have to worry about heating our houses. But there are an awful lot of people who do. Only 16 percent of the people who are eligible by income for low-income heating assistance last year got some help.

And the fact is that the average price for home heating oil has more than

doubled since 2001 and 2002, yet LIHEAP has increased only 20 percent since that time. Average prices for natural gas are up 31 percent. Average prices for home heating oil are up 25 percent, for propane up 18 percent, just from one winter to another.

Over 3 years' time they are much, much steeper. So I would suggest that the family that was able to get through the winter without help when home heating oil was selling for $1.16 a gallon, as it was 4 years ago, is going to have a little more trouble coping when heating oil reaches $2.40 a gallon, the average price now.

So I would suggest that to eliminate this funding is unadvisable. I am myself unhappy with the provision in the committee bill, because unlike the original Obey amendment which was offered in committee, this does not even require the funding be provided this year; but at least it allows that funding to be spent in this year or next.

And I think that that is better than nothing. I think the gentleman's amendment, while I respect him and respect certainly his right to offer it, I think that the amendment itself is misguided and ought to be defeated.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, let me simply suggest that the fact is that there are many people in this country who have to choose between heating their homes and eating. I think we ought to make their life just a little bit easier.

I yield to the gentleman from New Hampshire.

Mr. Chairman, in the interests of redundancy, I would urge that we defeat the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, we have moved past the point in the bill where the Flake amendment was to be offered, which would have attempted to strike an earmark that was contained in last year's bill for which a correction is found in this year's bill.

I am pleased that amendment was not offered. But I would like to take just a moment to urge every Member of this House to think before they leap on the issue of giving the President the authority for what is, in effect, an item veto.

I find it mindboggling that there are some people in this Chamber who believe that the main institutional problem that we have in this Congress is that the President has insufficient power vis-a-vis the Congress of the United States.

We have a President who has taken us to war on the basis of manipulated and selected intelligence. We have an administration under whom persons have been tortured, and we are told that more than 100 persons in captivity have died. We have an administration that eavesdrops on American citizens without a court order.

And then we say that the problem is that the President has too little power? I would suggest quite the contrary. If any of you are interested in the line item veto, I would urge you to for a moment forget who is in the White House now and think what might have happened under Lyndon Johnson.

This was a President of my own party, a President who lied to this Congress about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Gaylord Nelson, from my home State, was one of the first three people in the Senate to vote against the first appropriation for Vietnam.

Can you imagine what Lyndon Johnson would have done to Gaylord Nelson if he had had any version of the item veto at his disposal? He would have put his arm around Gaylord. He would have said, ``Gaylord, you support that war or you are not going to get your wild rivers designation. You support that war or you are not going to get this earmark for the forest service. You support that war or you are not going to get anything that you want in the budget.''

And I can imagine, I can imagine the power that Johnson would have had using that kind of device. I would also suggest I believe that many, many reforms that are adopted in politics wind up being counterintuitive. And I would suggest, for instance, that an item veto could, in fact, significantly raise the cost of doing business in government affairs because Presidents will dangle projects in front of Members if they are ``good,'' ``good'' being defined by the White House. And that could, in fact, enhance the White House's ability to pass questionable legislation by dangling goodies in front of Members and threatening to cut them if they did not.

So I think my record is clear on earmarks. This Congress provided many fewer earmarks when I was chairman of the Appropriations Committee than it has in any year since that time. But having said that, I think it is important, in whatever choices we make about earmarks, to not inadvertently in that process enhance the power of the executive branch of government so that they are even more strong than they are today, vis-a-vis the Congress of the United States.

In the last analysis, there is only one check on untrammeled executive power, and that check is the Congress of the United States. And I would urge Members of this House, regardless of party, not to weaken that check. That check is not just important to the Congress. It is important to the American people.

Not in the 36 years that I have served here, has any President ever seen any Congress change that President's spending request by more than 3 percent. And it is that 3 percent difference that makes a difference between having a President and having a king.

With all due respect, I think we ought to make certain we continue to have a democracy, not an unofficial monarchy, and I believe that an item veto would contribute to destroying that very delicate balance of power between the two branches, and give even

more power to the executive branch which in so many ways is demonstrating runaway executive power right now.

Mr. Chairman, did the gentleman rise to make his point of order?

Would the gentleman withhold temporarily?

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, as the gentleman from Arkansas says, we have hundreds of thousands of seniors who are faced with absolute confusion on this prescription drug bill. What we are trying to do is help them sort through some of the ridiculous choices they are being forced to make.

What we are trying to do is to say that we will move the sign up deadline back to the end of the year to give them more time to sort out which plan best fits their needs. In my State, for instance, there are over 40 plans being offered to seniors.

Secondly, we are saying give those seniors one opportunity to change a plan after May. Right now, if they do not make a change before May, they are stuck. Give them an opportunity to change once after May if they discover they have made the wrong choices in plans.

Why are we offering this on the appropriations bill? It is very simple, because the rules were abused egregiously in order to enable the passage of this bill in the first place. The bill contained an outrageous gap in coverage now called the ``doughnut hole.'' It also contained a provision which forbade, which forbade the government

from even negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry on price.

How did that happen? Because the majority leadership of this House held the vote open for 3 hours in order to change the verdict. The way things are supposed to work in the House, as everybody knows, is that when we vote, these machines open, our name lights up on the board, we take our voting card, we put it in, and 15 minutes later the people with the most votes are supposed to be the winners. That is not the way this bill was passed.

The way this bill was passed was that this bill was defeated at the end of 15 minutes. It was defeated at the end of a half an hour. It was defeated at the end of an hour. It was defeated after 2 hours. It was defeated after 2\1/2\ hours. But finally after 3 hours of holding the vote open the bill passed. How? Because the Republican leadership of this House broke Members' arms to vote for a bill they did not want to vote for because it contained these defects.

That is why we are trying to use the rules that were abused in that action in order to correct the abuse and give our seniors in the process a little more time to make a crucial decision in their lives.

I would urge support for the amendment, and I would urge the gentleman not to raise a point of order against the bill.

Mr. Chairman, could I ask how much time I have remaining.

Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky).

Mr. Chairman, I do.

Mr. Chairman, it is ironic that the same rules that were abused in order to pass this legislation in the first place are now being hidden behind the majority in order to prevent us from correcting the flaws in that legislation. We could correct those flaws if the majority refrained from offering their point of order. Unfortunately, it appears that they are going to insist, and so they will have again selectively used the rules of this House to accomplish an end which would not have been reachable had the rules been adhered to in the first instance.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, we are here because last year on the defense appropriations bill, in the middle of the night, we were trying to finish action on that bill, and we had agreed that we would add the administration's request for $7 billion to fund a research program to develop vaccines to deal with avian flu. When the majority produced their bill, it only had $3.5 billion. We asked why the other money that was requested by the administration was not included. I was told by Senator Stevens, the chairman of the conference, that that was because the majority party had decided that they would not deal with the issue of drug company indemnification, and until they did, they were not going to put the long-term money in the bill.

So they told us in writing, as well as orally, that they were not going to add any language indemnifying the drug companies. The conference ended about eight o'clock.

Close to midnight, the majority leader of the United States Senate walked over to the Speaker's office and insisted that 40 pages of language never read or never checked out by anybody, that 40 pages of language never voted on by anybody be inserted in that conference report without a vote of the conferees, and that was jammed down our throats the next day.

That language purported to protect drug companies in case they made some faulty flu vaccine; but, in fact, the language went far beyond that. It applied to all vaccines, it applied to all drugs and all medical devices that the Secretary chose to apply it to. It provided no possibility for judicial review at all. So in other words, it said if you get sick, if you lose your health because of a faulty vaccine or a faulty device, you cannot sue the drug company; you have to collect from the government.

But guess what? They put no money in the fund that was supposed to be used to compensate victims. So it was a catch-22.

We are here today because, in my view, that action inserting that language, without a vote of the conferees, was one of the most egregious corruptions of the legislative process that I have seen in the 37 years that I have been here. And we are trying to use the rules of the House today to reverse what happened because of an egregious abuse of those rules by the leadership of this House and by the leadership of the Senate.

Of all people, of all people in the Congress, the leadership of both Houses have an obligation to protect the integrity of the institution and the integrity of the rules. When they themselves lead the charge to obliterate any opportunity to use the rules in defense of normal processes in this House, then, in my view, they have ultimately corrupted the process of legislation.

So this amendment ordinarily would not be here, but the damage was done on this bill last year, and so we are trying to use the same vehicle to undo the damage. We recognize there needs to be some indemnification language, but it needs to be reviewed by somebody other than drug company lobbyists; and until that happens, I am going to continue to be mad as hell about this and do everything I possibly can to reverse the outcome.

We are trying to preach democracy in Iraq. It would be nice if the leadership of this Congress showed some here at home in this institution.

Mr. Chairman, I would simply say that what the gentleman is suggesting by insisting on his point of order is that the rules of this House may be bent by the majority in order to provide special interest language in a piece of legislation, but they cannot be used by the minority to defend the public interest in that same case. I would find that a strange interpretation of the rules indeed.

Mr. Chairman, because this is the only way that we can protest this egregious corruption of the rules of the House, I respectfully appeal the ruling of the Chair.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word, and I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina.

Mr. Chairman, with this bill, we will now have spent as much money in Iraq as we did in Vietnam. If you adjust for inflation, it is now just about the equivalent.

It seems to me that spending almost half a trillion dollars of the taxpayers' money is indefensible unless we are willing to see to it that that money is spent as well as we can possibly accomplish that fact.

I guess it boils down to this: if Members are happy with reading day after day about stories that are published about waste and fraud and ripoffs by contractors in Iraq, if they are tired of reading about the insider deals and the single-source contracts for work to be done in Iraq, if a Republican-controlled Congress cannot bring itself to conduct a really vigorous investigation of a Republican administration, then they ought to vote ``no.''

But if you think that we ought to be doing now exactly as we were doing in World War II, when Harry Truman conducted the kind of investigation the gentleman from Massachusetts mentioned, if you think we ought to replicate that effort, then you vote ``yes.''

I would submit that the Roosevelt administration was not damaged by the investigations done by the Truman Committee, they were strengthened by it, because that meant they had more resources available to get the job done in defeating the Japanese and defeating the Nazis.

I want to congratulate the gentleman from Massachusetts for the leadership that he has shown on this issue.

Mr. Chairman, I urge an ``aye'' vote.

Point of Order

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I would simply note, given what the gentleman just said, that is exactly what we have done with Iraq. Every dollar of the Iraq war has been financed through a supplemental appropriation. That is the way the administration has been able to hide from the taxpayers the full long- term cost of this war. That is the way they have been able to avoid systematic oversight. They put it in a supplemental, and then it is a must-pass, hurry-up, piece-at-a-time operation. Eventually you get the whole pie, but you get it in pieces, and the public doesn't know what the total picture is.

So I would simply say that I was kind of amused by that comment because the administration is way ahead of all of us. They decided a long time ago that they are going to supplemental the Congress to death, and they put every possible dollar they can into supplementals. They have yet to spend $1 in a regular defense appropriation bill for Iraq.

So I just find it interesting that one person is expected to live up to a standard that the administration itself won't live up to.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. Chairman, I would just say I am very happy to work with the gentleman to try to deal with the problem.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I am being asked every two seconds by Members, what is the story about tonight. Let me simply suggest, and ask the gentleman from California if he concurs. It is my understanding that what we are trying to do is to put together a unanimous consent agreement under which we would be able to complete our business of debating all of the pending amendments within about another 11 hours. That assumes that we can get that UC agreement. If we can't, the debate could go on far longer. We don't quite have that UC agreement worked out yet, but we are trying to. And what we are hoping to do is to proceed with a number of amendments, the Millender-McDonald, Souder, Engel, Shays, Hyde, Burton, Capuano, Salazar, Doggett, Hinojosa, Melancon, Jefferson, Reyes, Jackson-Lee, and Tierney/Leach. We are trying to get at least that far tonight. We don't know if we can. I would ask the gentleman if he has any disagreement with what I just said.

And I would simply say, my understanding is if we can reach this UC agreement, there will be no further votes tonight.

It is also my understanding that afterwards, there is an intention to have the Energy and Commerce Committee also bring up a matter relating to the Low Income Heating Assistance Program.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) a question. As the gentleman knows there is a tradition of courtesy in this House which dictates that when either party has a function that the House will not be in session beyond say 5 or 6 o'clock.

We have made an exception this evening despite the fact that there was a dispute in the Republican caucus earlier in the day, which ate up an extra hour and a half and despite the fact that we have been told that other legislation needed to be brought to the floor. We still indicated our desire to cooperate in establishing a time limit, because we were trying to facilitate the Members of both parties leaving here tomorrow afternoon.

It now appears to me that despite our willingness to do that, we are getting a continual stream of new amendments being produced on the majority side, which are preventing us from reaching a time agreement that would enable us to get out of here at a reasonable hour tomorrow afternoon. I would like to know what the status of the situation is because at this point, I frankly see no purpose in continuing tonight if all we are going to do is give people more time to draft more amendments.

We have imposed a deadline on our side of the aisle and told Members that amendments will not be considered if they come in after a certain hour. But my understanding is on the Republican side there are still amendments coming in and the majority is being pressured to put them on the list. I do not mind working cooperatively, but I do mind when I am being taken advantage of.

I want to suggest that if we can not reach an agreement on time within the next 10 minutes, I for one intend to move to adjourn.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

I want it understood that if we do not have an agreement in 10 minutes, I will move to adjourn.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, what I am trying to do still in the interest of cooperation tonight, I am trying to filibuster until Mr. Capuano, who is ready to offer the amendment, is ready to offer at this point.

Could I ask if the gentleman is ready? He is ready. This is probably the shortest filibuster in the history of the House.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.