Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, and I certainly will not, I simply want to point out that right now we are at page 35 in the bill. There are some 83 pages in the bill; and after we dispose of the amendments on those pages, we still have at least 24 amendments that come at the end of the bill, which means that unless we have considerable Member cooperation, we are going to be here deep into tonight and deep into tomorrow night. So I would invite Members to understand what the situation is with respect to the number of amendments still before us.

With that, I withdraw my reservation.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to simply agree with every word the gentleman from Virginia just spoke. I cannot think of a more mindless, shortsighted or ridiculous amendment to be offered that affects a serious problem than this amendment. It is absolutely backwards. It is ludicrous. It is absolutely against the interest of the United States.

What we are in effect saying is we have such great relations with this country that we don't want to do whatever we can to improve them by going directly to people through exchange programs. I find that to be ridiculous.

Madam Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I would simply like to make one observation. Scheduling of legislation is done by the majority party. I have, I think it is fair to say, given procedural cooperation every step of the way to see to it that before the House leaves for yet another recess, that we will finish this supplemental appropriation bill.

I am Irish, and French, and a few other things. And like a number of other people, I was invited to the Irish Embassy tonight because this is close to Saint Patrick's Day. I turned that invitation down because I knew that we would be here tonight having to work on this bill. And even though my own party had an event tonight, we have agreed to stay here and continue to work on this bill, and we are staying considerably later than we had first agreed to, but we are trying to finish these amendments so that Members can get out of here at a reasonable time tomorrow, hopefully late tomorrow afternoon instead of into the evening. That is why we are staying here late tonight.

Now I discover that there is one amendment that could have been offered tonight, but we are told that we can't offer it because the member of the Appropriations Committee on the majority side who wants to handle it is, guess where? At the Irish Embassy.

Well, I would simply suggest that I don't mind somebody else enjoying themselves, but I do suggest that if Members of the minority are expected to be here, if members of the Appropriations Committee on the minority side are expected to be here, I do think it is too much to ask that the party setting the schedule expect the same thing of Members on its side.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from California. Well, no, I wouldn't be happy to, but I will.

Well, I am truly sorry we can't make as much progress on this bill tonight as I had hoped we would be able to make, but I find some of the reasons for that to be quite interesting.

And, Madam Chairman, I am going to ask unanimous consent that we might move to another amendment by Mr. Melancon at the end of the bill.

We will wait until he is here.

Amendment Offered by Mr. Melancon

Mr. Speaker, this bill, or the bill which will be debated under this rule, will spend $92 billion of the taxpayers' money. The largest portion of it will be to fund the continuing war in Iraq. It is here because of the most spectacular military blunder committed by any President of the United States in this country's history. We went to war on the basis of bad information, and we are now mired in that war because of the spectacular incompetence and stubbornness of the Secretary of Defense.

We are also going to be asked to fund additional payments to meet the aftermath of the Katrina hurricane, which is another spectacular example of the incompetent management of government by this administration.

I am going to vote against the previous question on the rule because, while some 48 amendments have been noticed to the committee for consideration over the next 2 days, this House has still apparently not found a way to enable us to consider two other amendments.

The first is the one mentioned by the gentlewoman from New York. We feel it is an obligation of this Congress to begin to conduct decent oversight on both the expenditures in Iraq and the expenditures in Katrina. This Congress has a miserable record on oversight. My colleague in the Senate, Mr. Feingold, introduced a resolution censuring the President for various actions that he has taken outside of the law. I believe that the Congress itself deserves censure for not meeting its oversight responsibilities.

One way to meet those oversight responsibilities is to repeat what this Congress did during World War II when it created the Truman Commission. At that time, you had a Democratic Congress that was not afraid to investigate the activities of a Democratic administration, and Harry Truman investigated waste and war profiteering. They held 432 public hearings, 300 executive sessions, went on hundreds of fact- finding missions, issued 51 reports and saved some $15 billion of the taxpayers' money.

We have stories that are rampant today about the abuse of taxpayer money in Iraq and Katrina, and yet this Congress is doing very little by way of aggressive oversight. I am going to vote against the previous question because I want to see an amendment creating a new Truman committee made in order.

The second thing I want to see is I want to see Congress, since the committee has already voted to block the Dubai port deal, I want to see the Congress go beyond that and to establish a rational process to guarantee that in the future our government will know every time a similar transaction is being contemplated. Right now, the only way our government knows is if the two parties who have an economic interest in the deal voluntarily tell the United States Government.

Mr. Sabo tried to get that amendment adopted in committee. It failed.

In my view, if you are going the pass the Lewis amendment, which all but two members of the Appropriations Committee supported, it ought to also contain the Sabo amendment so that we do, in fact, establish a rational process so that we are not just looking like a flock of chickens every time something happens that panics the Congress. In that way, we would at least have a systematic way for the administration to review each and every one of these potential sales or transactions, and we would have a way for Congress to do the same.

So, unless those two amendments can be considered by this House, I see no reason why I should support the previous question or the rule, for that matter.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

I would simply say, ordinarily, I would agree that the authorizing committee should deal with this issue. But given the fact that the Appropriations Committee at the leadership level took the action to wipe out the Dubai deal, to me it was appropriate that we make that provision have even more sense by having it attached by the same committee that did the other deed.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey), the ranking member of the Foreign Operations Subcommittee.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 10 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, as I said earlier, this bill is here because of a massive failure of American leadership, which goes right to the very top in the White House.

We are going to be spending $90 billion in this bill, most of which goes for Iraq, a war which was engaged in by our country, initiated by our country on the basis of bad information and manipulated intelligence. After we were in the war, we were told by the administration that Iraqi reconstruction would cost between $1 and $2 billion and could be financed by Iraqi oil revenues.

After the administration submitted its reconstruction request for over $18 billion, Secretary Rumsfeld told us, ``We just had no idea of how bad the Iraqi economy was.''

That certainly is an understatement.

The administration then claimed that we would be greeted as liberators and that 6 months after the invasion, we could begin withdrawing troops. Since then, the insurgency has exploded. We have lost over 2,300 U.S. troops who have been killed. Thousands have been injured. Many more Iraqis have been killed and a continuing U.S. troop deployment in Iraq of around 130,000, down only slightly from the 150,000 in the year before.

We have had a failure to plan for adequately equipping our troops with armor. And as a result, our troops have been rummaging for scrap metal from garbage dumps and they have had to deal with a myriad of other equipment shortages.

Then we have seen the disgraceful stories about Abu Ghraib. We have seen stories about torture all being done in the name of the United States, in the name of every citizen of this country. We have reports that more than 100 people have died in custody, and then we have reports that the administration is spying on Americans and eavesdropping on Americans. I want to make it clear, I want our government to eavesdrop on every person that it needs to eavesdrop on in order to protect this country, but I want it done in a way which is constitutional, and in a way which is in conformance with the law, not outside the law, and right now that is not the case.

So this bill comes before us with the United States divided and with the American people confused about what our mission is, what our purpose is, and what our plans are. And now we are asked to provide this additional money.

I will vote for this bill because, while I have grave misgivings about the war, and while I believe that Mr. Rumsfeld should have resigned a long time ago, I intend to support whatever money is necessary in order to support our troops. But having said that, let me just make another observation. We are going to be spending $91 billion. $19 billion is for Katrina. Over almost $70 billion is for Iraq. And I am told that those funds will be expended at a rate of about $6.8 billion a month. And yet we are going to be squabbling over the next 2 days over a fraction of that amount that some of us believe should be used to provide heating for our elderly, education for our kids, and medical care for our veterans.

Three years after this war began, does anybody here really believe the President of the United States when he tells us that this is all about bringing democracy and freedom to Iraq? $400 billion and then some later, does anybody believe that Congress did the right thing when this Congress handed a blank check to the administration? After more than 17,000 Americans wounded in Iraq, does anyone think Congress was right to sit on its hands when it was clear that this White House and the civilian leadership at the Pentagon did not have the first clue about what they were doing?

Mr. Chairman, in addition to the divisions which we face on Iraq, we face some other problems with this bill.

This bill, for instance, contains Mr. Lewis' amendment shutting off and shutting down the ports transaction involving Dubai. At the same time, however, the committee blocked the Sabo amendment which would have created a process which would have guaranteed that our government would know each and every time such a transaction was being contemplated. Without the Sabo

amendment, we are still in a position where notice to the American government of any such transaction is optional. We do not believe on this side of the aisle it ought to be optional.

Secondly, the committee blocked efforts, again by Mr. Sabo, to add $3.4 billion for crucially needed funding to strengthen port security and border security.

The committee cut back my amendment to provide $1 billion to help low-income Americans pay for higher energy prices which are in large measure arising today because of our misadventures in Iraq. The committee cut back that effort to $750 million with no guarantee that a single dollar of that will be provided to people who need it this year.

Then the committee declined to support a provision by Mr. Berry which would have repaired the prescription drug plan that has now gone into effect and which would have at least given seniors more time to sort out their confusion before they have to commit themselves to signing up for one plan or another.

The committee also refused to adopt, well, to save time, I will skip the other three points that I think were important to discuss, but let me simply say this, Mr. Chairman. There will be a lot of debate on this bill over the next 2 days, and a lot of it will be focused on Iraq. But I think it is important for each and every American to understand and it is important for each and every man and woman representing this country in uniform to understand that our divisions about the advisability of the war and about what ought to happen next in that war have nothing whatsoever to do with our feelings for those who wear the uniform of the United States and are presently engaged in this contest. They have done every possible thing that could be asked of them. We owe them our gratitude for their sense of sacrifice, their willingness to answer the call of their country, and I do not think that turmoil over the advisability of the war ought to be mistaken for disagreement that we owe a debt of obligation to each and every person who is fighting in that war.

I wish we had a similar sense of self-sacrifice on the part of persons who are not participating in that war. It sometimes seems that the only people who are being asked to sacrifice are military families. We are telling the rest of the country, while some folks are off to war, ``Do not worry, folks, we are going to give you a nice fat tax cut, and people who make $1 million a year are going to get $110,000 tax cut.'' No sense of self-sacrifice there.

So, Mr. Speaker, I intend to vote for this bill in the end, but we could have adopted a number of amendments which would have made this a much more balanced product, and I would hope that as we go through the debate that we will find a way to at least address some of the issues which we failed to address when the committee dealt with the bill last week.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield 7 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran).

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, this has been a very frustrating day. I can remember when this place used to be a legislative body. Now it has unfortunately become 99 percent a political institution, and even the politics of the institution doesn't seem to be working out too well on either side of the aisle.

What we have before us now is a holy picture debate. This is a Potemkin amendment. It is a Potemkin debate, and it is another example of how Congress has been reduced to dealing in symbols rather than dealing with substance.

We have had this country in a frenzy about the Dubai involvement in American ports over the past couple of weeks. The Appropriations Committee had a vote, and by vote of 62 to 2, the committee adopted an amendment by the distinguished chairman of the committee, Mr. Lewis, which shut off the ability of the Dubai company to make their purchase of American port facilities.

We tried, in the committee, to make that action more rational by also establishing a process under which we would have a regularized notice to our government every time such a transaction is being proposed. The committee saw fit to turn that down.

We are now out on the floor. What is going on now is that there is such a frenzy to have every single member of the House also on record on this issue, that we now have a faux debate going on. As I read this, the only purpose of this debate today is to allow every Member of the House to cast a vote. It is what I call a holy picture vote, and it means that when the votes come, this amendment is going to be overwhelmingly defeated.

The only purposes I see that will have been accomplished by taking this time, is that Members will then have a vote in their pocket that they can take home and brag to people about. I admire the gentleman from Maryland and his willingness to be a sacrificial lamb on the amendment. I know that one or two people on this side of the aisle, such as Mr. Moran, share his view, and I admire them for their courage.

I have to say that I really am frustrated to see on this, and a number of other amendments today and tomorrow, this House is going to deal with these issues in a symbolic manner rather than discussing it in a thorough, systematic way that might bring some additional credit to the House.

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

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

Mr. Chairman, this place is really something else. We just had a debate on an amendment that doesn't do ``nothing'' to or for ``nobody''.

The Dubai deal is already dead, and so it is irrelevant whether this House votes for the Gilchrest amendment or not. Because the Dubai deal is already dead, the Lewis Amendment is eviscerated; it does not do anything. It leaves the country with the same problem that we had before we discovered the Dubai controversy.

What Mr. Sabo is doing today is what he usually does, which is to try to bring a bit of objectivity and concern for substance into a political pit. And what Mr. Sabo is saying in his amendment is ``Let's fix the process so that we do not have the future spectacle of a President to the United States being clueless when a transaction like Dubai is about to take place.''

So what Mr. Sabo is saying is, ``Look, the problem with the process is that, right now, it is voluntary, whether or not the people with an economic interest in such a transaction ever notifies our government or not.''

What the Sabo Amendment would do is to say, ``Let's make sure our government always knows what is happening with these kind of transactions.'' And the second thing the Sabo Amendment does is to make certain that Congress can have a role, if it chooses, in this process. Because right now the only time Congress is ever informed is if the President turns down a transaction. They are not informed if the President goes ahead with it.

So I would suggest it would be quaint indeed if this House uses a technicality in the rules to eliminate the only amendment that does something and then makes a big political production out of voting on the Gilchrest amendment, which is totally irrelevant. It is as irrelevant as the Lewis amendment is, because Dubai is already done, the deal is gone, it is quashed.

What Mr. Sabo is trying to do is to create some order for the future.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am asking the House to vote down the previous question on this rule today so that the House might have an opportunity to consider two provisions which were dealt with in the Appropriations Committee yesterday. As we all know, this country has been rocked with stories about the potential purchase of port facilities in this country by a foreign corporation. I am not quite sure what the policy ought to be, but I do know that we ought to have a policy.

In fact, this country needs to have an overall policy with respect to the question of foreign investment in this country in general, but we do not. What we have discovered in this episode is that when a company such as the port terminal that has been discussed in newspapers, when a company like that is purchased by another foreign entity, it is only at the option of the two parties who have an economic interest that our government is even informed that the transaction is taking place. That is why our President had to tell the Nation that he did not have a clue about this port transaction.

Well, our President ought to have a clue and we ought to have a process that guarantees that he will be informed and that process should not rely on the voluntary action of the parties who stand to make money in the deal.

Yesterday in the Appropriations Committee we had an amendment adopted by Mr. Lewis, the chairman, which threw out the Dubai port deal. But the committee in that process declined to support the Sabo amendment which would have tried to establish a process under which this country would be guaranteed that our government would always know when such a transaction is being contemplated. And it would have set up a process which would have assured a time certain for Presidential action and would have given the Congress a role to play in that process.

Without the action of the Sabo amendment, we are simply, on an ad hoc basis, taking one action to forbid one port from being purchased by a foreign party but we are still leaving the country open to other deals about which our government could know nothing. I do not think there are 10 people in the Congress who knew, for instance, that a Chinese corporation had taken over the port at Long Beach. It would be nice if our Government knew things like that.

The only way that we are going to get something like this done is if we force the Congress to face the entire issue. And it seems to me that this bill is a handy vehicle for doing that. I know that people will say, ``Well, you are trying to attach a matter to a bill that does not have anything to do with the matter at hand.'' I would simply say I have learned plenty from the majority leadership of this House about how to do that in the past few years, and I think we need to take advantage of that learning at this point to deal with what is a very serious problem facing our country on this question.

We need to have a policy on this so that we do not look as we did yesterday, like a bunch of chickens flying in all directions the minute an issue becomes controversial. We need to have a long-term policy to deal with this issue. The Sabo amendment, as it amends the Lewis amendment in the Appropriations Committee yesterday, would do that. And this bill before us today would be a decent venue to discuss that in a broad fashion, which is why I would urge defeat of the previous question so that we might be afforded the opportunity to offer such an amendment and have the House work its will on it.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 7 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, as the gentleman from California has indicated, the majority is bringing to the floor a bill that transfers $712 million from FEMA to SBA for Katrina-related costs. We are told that SBA projects they will run out of money by February 21 without the action contained in this bill. That is despite the fact that the Congress has just passed a supplemental appropriation for Katrina that was signed into law on December 30 of 2005.

At that time, Congress actually provided SBA emergency supplemental funding totaling $441 million. SBA stated that the reason their projections were inadequate was because the size of the loans were much larger than previous disasters, from approximately $30,000 to $60,000 per loan.

Even though Katrina and other hurricanes hit in late August, because the SBA was so slow in approving loans, they had no idea of the size. Once the SBA began to approve loans at a quicker pace, they apparently discovered that they would probably be short of funds, but even that, Mr. Speaker, is not the whole story.

SBA believes they will need an additional $400 to $600 million on top of what is being provided here to provide funding for all the hurricane victims of Katrina, Rita and Wilma. The difference is expected to be presented during the larger Iraq-Katrina supplemental, which is supposed to be coming any day.

The fact that the administration had no idea that one of the key agencies on the ground in Louisiana was almost out of money seems to me to be just another example of the wholly inadequate response which the Nation has seen in the aftermath of these hurricanes. The administration's initial response was disorganized and indecisive. The people who knew what they were doing, the experienced career employees of FEMA and other first responders, were apparently ignored by incompetent and unqualified political cronies who should never have been in the positions of leadership that they had.

I would have thought that 9/11 would have been a wake-up call. I would have thought that Katrina would be a wake-up call. I think that every Member of this House has the right to be tired of being disappointed by the folks who cannot shoot straight when it comes to providing the needed relief.

Let me also, Mr. Speaker, express my concern about the fact that this Congress is not taking action to address another problem which is an emergency, namely, the energy crisis in this country. Despite some relief being caused by warmer than usual temperatures, the latest figures issued on February 7 by the Department of Energy confirm that the cost of heating one's home has still risen dramatically this winter. Comparing this winter to last, average prices for natural gas are up by 31 percent, average prices for home heating oil are up 25 percent, and average prices for propane are up 18 percent just over that year.

In spite of those price increases, this year's appropriation for the Low Income Heating Assistance Program is actually $21 million less than last year. A shortfall in LIHEAP is even more serious than these price figures would suggest, Mr. Speaker, because, first, this winter's increase comes on top of price increases over the past several years that far outpace the appropriations this Congress has provided for

Mr. Speaker, I was told that I had one other Member who wanted to speak, but she is detained in another meeting. So I think if the gentleman is interested in yielding back the balance of his time, we could do that on this side as well.

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

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the right to object in order to simply ask at the proper time that I may be allowed to insert a statement from Mr. Conyers in the Record with respect to the PATRIOT Act.

And I have been asked by the distinguished minority leader, Ms. Pelosi, to read the following statement:

``Mr. Speaker, I do not intend to object to this 1-month extension of the PATRIOT Act provision contained in this legislation. We would have preferred a 3- or 6-month extension to allow the American people a longer time to discuss the very serious impacts of these provisions on the civil liberties of the American people. But it appears we will only be given 1 month for that national debate.

``I also want it to be clear that this legislation involves only a small portion of the PATRIOT Act. Ninety percent of that act is law and remains law, regardless of what we do here today.

``The portion of the law in dispute is the very controversial section that affects the basic civil liberties of the American people. The rights of our citizens, as guaranteed by the Constitution, should not be shoehorned into a tight timeframe. We should have the time for a vigorous and thorough debate. In the meantime, the overwhelming majority of the PATRIOT Act is in place, and will remain in effect.

``Mr. Speaker, there is a very crucial debate in this country today about the rights of American citizens to privacy, and about the proper role of the Congress and courts in assuring that no one, not even the President, tramples on those basic privacy rights without complying with the law. In this atmosphere, it is appropriate to give additional time to examine the implications of these controversial provisions of the PATRIOT Act.''

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, more than a year ago when Mr. Lewis was elected chairman of the Appropriations Committee, he came to me and asked if we could have an understanding that we would express our substantive differences, but still cooperate in moving bills forward in an orderly way once those differences were expressed. We did that.

Time and time again, the minority was denied the opportunity to offer different sets of priorities, priorities that did not offer huge tax cuts for those who have the most in society, paid for with cuts in education, health care, and worker protection for those who have the least. Despite the fact that the rules of the House were used to block our efforts to obtain on-the-record votes on a number of our alternatives, Democrats continued to cooperate procedurally even as we made clear our differences on policy.

The Republican majority wanted to finish all of these bills by the end of the fiscal year, and we did not procedurally obstruct them, because while we differed strongly with the values that lie behind their budget priorities, we respected the fact that they are in the majority, and we respect and revere this institution. But because of internal divisions between the majority party, divisions within the House GOP caucus, and divisions between House and Senate Republicans, the fiscal year ended with the Labor-HHS bill and the Defense appropriations bill that represents 67 percent of the discretionary spending in our budget bill still being hung up in the legislative process.

Now in the closing days of this Congress, the Republican leadership has decided to use the must-pass Defense appropriations bill to force down the throats of the American people a number of wholly unrelated gifts to special interests. They decided to hold funds for our troops hostage in order to force Congress into removing protections against oil drilling in ANWR.

To make room for their tax giveaways, they even imposed a second round of cuts on education, health, worker protection, and even imposed a $4 billion additional cut in military spending. Senate action yesterday has corrected one provision inserted in the bill by the abuse of power, the strong-arm attempts at drilling in ANWR, and for that I applaud the Senate. I led the opposition to ANWR's inclusion in the conference, and I am happy that the Congress was not blackmailed into accepting it.

But, frankly, Mr. Speaker, continuing under my reservation, ANWR was not the biggest problem with the conference report. The biggest problem is that it shortchanges our economic future by refusing to make adequate investments in education. And it cruelly neglects to strengthen support for programs that help provide critical health care services to people who desperately need them.

But we have lost that fight. This Congress has made the decision to cut critical health, education, worker protection, and social service funding by $3 billion below last year's level. What I find so gutless about Congress' performance on this bill is that those cuts could not pass the Senate on a rollcall vote, so the majority party had to arrange for their Senators to duck this vote, thereby hiding from accountability by arranging for the bill to be passed through the Senate without a rollcall vote. That means the majority party has denied critical help to families most in need of help, but has not had the courage to forthrightly defend their votes to the people affected in the public arena.

This bill makes that problem $1.4 billion worse for those programs and because of the across-the-board cut, it makes other ill-advised cuts in critical funding for the FBI and local law enforcement, and it even cuts an additional $4 billion out of the Defense bill. If I could do anything to change that, I would; but it is clear the die is cast.

Continuing under my reservation, Mr. Speaker, there is a second outrageous problem with this bill. The majority has turned the proposal to prepare for a flu pandemic into a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry. When the President requested $7 billion to begin a much- belated crash program to develop a new generation of vaccines and antiviral drugs to combat a potential flu pandemic, the Republican majority responded by cutting it in half. When I asked Senator Stevens in conference why we shouldn't fund the rest of the administration's request so that it was clear that the government had a long-term commitment to the development of needed vaccines and antivirals, he responded that because liability protection language for manufacturers was not being adopted, long-range funding should be withheld.

The conference committee ended its work with the understanding, both verbal and in writing, that there would be no legislative liability protection language inserted in this bill. And because the majority told us it did not want any compensation program for victims to be applied against the discretionary portion of the budget, no funding was provided for that, either.

But after the conference was finished at 6 p.m., Senator Frist marched over to the House side of the Capitol about 4 hours later and insisted that over 40 pages of legislation, which I have in my hand, 40 pages of legislation that had never been seen by conferees, be attached to the bill. The Speaker joined him in that assistance so that, without a vote of the conferees, that legislation was unilaterally and arrogantly inserted into the bill after the conference was over in a blatantly abusive power play by two of the most powerful men in Congress.

We then discovered that this language provided all sorts of insulation for pharmaceutical companies and that this insulation applied not just to drugs developed to deal with the flu but in fact applied to a far broader range of products. In essence, the provisions allowed the Secretary of HHS to issue a declaration that has the effect of almost completely prohibiting lawsuits in State or Federal courts by persons whose health was injured against manufacturers and various others for compensation for injuries caused by the use of covered countermeasures.

That determination would bar lawsuits against a wide range of covered persons involved with the countermeasures including manufacturers and

their suppliers, their distributors, State and local governments and their employees involved with the use of those countermeasures, medical personnel prescribing and administering the countermeasures, and so forth.

That is very broad power, indeed, to ban lawsuits. Unlike the language requested by the administration, the division E language is not limited to products to combat a flu pandemic. Rather, it applies to any drug, vaccine, medical device, or other products useful in dealing with anything the Secretary considers to constitute a health emergency or that could constitute an emergency in the future.

Although a rationale often offered for lawsuit protection is that it is needed to encourage manufacturers to develop and produce new treatments, the protections of division E are not limited to new or experimental products. Rather, nothing in the language would prevent the Secretary from providing protection against lawsuits to drugs that have been on the market for decades. Further, the language explicitly prohibits any judicial review in either Federal or State court of the Secretary's decisions to grant immunity from lawsuits.

If anyone believes that the power is being exercised too broadly, or even in violation of the law, they apparently would have no remedy other than asking the Secretary to change his mind or asking Congress to amend the law.

Although proponents point to provisions of this language that make an exception and allow lawsuits in cases of willful misconduct, that exception is so narrowly drawn as to be almost meaningless. First, the provision defines ``willful misconduct'' as acts taken intentionally to achieve a wrongful purpose, knowing there is no legal or factual justification, and in disregard of known or obvious great risk. Basically, Mr. Speaker, the only conduct that would permit a lawsuit under this definition is probably conduct so egregious as to be criminal in nature.

However, even this highly restrictive definition of ``willful misconduct'' doesn't seem to have been enough restriction on lawsuits to satisfy the authors of division E. They added yet another provision that allows the Secretary of HHS to promulgate regulations further narrowing the scope of actions that could give rise to a right to sue. Then there is yet another provision that says that if the conduct in question is regulated under the Food and Drug Act or Public Health Service Act, a lawsuit for willful misconduct can be brought only if the Federal Government has taken enforcement action against that conduct.

Finally, the language makes various changes to the normal rules of civil procedure to add further obstacles and difficulties in front of a potential plaintiff. In short, as a practical matter, there is virtually no right for anyone to sue about anything covered by a secretarial determination under this language.

In summary, the administration asked for some very broad liability protections for manufacturers and others involved with countermeasures against pandemic flu, and the administration's proposal was widely criticized as going too far. With division E of the Defense appropriations conference report, Congress would be providing even broader protection, potentially covering a wide range of drugs, vaccines, and devices far beyond what is needed to deal with flu. Further, this denial of the right to sue is more sweeping than provided in the case of childhood vaccines or in the case of smallpox vaccine. In the smallpox case, manufacturers were protected by basically substituting the Federal Government as defendant, with the scope of potential lawsuits against the Federal Government narrowed, but not eliminated.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I recognize that some sort of liability protection or indemnification is necessary and appropriate to encourage development and manufacture of some measures to deal with pandemic flu; and I would support such reasonable language, language that has been reviewed by a committee that knows what it is doing in a process that allows for public comments. But there are real doubts about whether it needs to be this broad. It is worth noting that Sanofi Pasteur, our only domestic flu vaccine manufacturer, has already signed contracts with the Federal Government to make avian flu vaccine and has already delivered some lots, rather than refusing to proceed until legislation like this is enacted. Similarly, Roche has been supplying Tamiflu for the national stockpile and actively seeking contracts to supply more.

The result of this legislative action was a provision in the pending bill that prevents anyone who is a victim of a faulty vaccine from being able to obtain compensation in the courts. It says, in effect, that if you become seriously ill because of mistakes in manufacturing that you lose your right to sue for compensation, but you can as an alternative seek compensation from the government. The problem is that no funds were provided, or no money was provided, for that fund. So anyone who gets sick would have to lobby Congress to put money in the fund before they can collect. Thus, people injured lose their right to sue, but are not guaranteed any alternative means of covering their medical bills, lost earnings, and other costs.

Mr. Speaker, the committee system was created years ago to ensure that, to protect the public interest, legislation would be carefully reviewed before it was placed before the body for consideration. But that protection was arbitrarily bypassed by the leadership in both Houses.

This is the second time that this Congress has supinely done the bidding of the pharmaceutical industry in the dead of night. The first time a vote was held open for 3 hours while the Republican majority twisted arms to create the complex and ridiculously confusing prescription drug bill that our seniors are now so desperately trying to understand, a bill that was ushered through this institution by over 600 lobbyists and that protected companies by preventing the government from even attempting to negotiate lower drug prices.

If I thought that denying unanimous consent on this bill would force the majority to eliminate that language, I would object. But, Mr. Speaker, it has also been made quite clear to me that the majority will not relent on the language that insulates drug companies. So, Mr. Speaker, I want it to be clear that the action to insert this special interest language in the bill is, in my view, a corruption of the legislative practices of the House.

When Congress returns in January, I intend to raise a question about the privileges of the House that are highlighted by this action because it has brought discredit to the House and should disturb every Member who serves here. No Member of Congress, no matter how powerful, should be able to unilaterally insist that provisions that were never discussed and never debated in the conference should wind up being slipped into that conference report without a vote of that same conference.

This is what happens when there are no checks and balances and when one party controls the White House, the Senate, and the House and respects no limits on its own use of power. We have been placed in this position because the House Republican leadership has sent Members home for the Christmas holidays with the message to the Senate that we would not be here even if the Senate changed the legislation the House sent. That was irresponsible, and the country will pay the price. This institution, unfortunately, will also pay a price in terms of diminished respect from the people we were elected to represent.

This is a shameful and shabby way to end the worst session of Congress I have experienced in my 36 years in this House. So, Mr. Speaker, I most reluctantly withdraw my reservation, because lodging an objection at this point would simply delay the shameful inevitable.

Reserving the right to object, Mr. Speaker, for the last 8 hours, we have been dealing with a majority leadership that has stripped out of the appropriations process and out of the conference virtually every major understanding we have had on those bills. We have had the United States Senate ram down our throats an ANWR provision. And then after we were assured in conference that there would be no language with respect to drug company indemnification, 3 hours after the conference report we get 45 pages of language which Senator Frist and the Speaker of the House demanded be included in the conference report after the conference was specifically told it would not be in there.

Now, I want to know how do we have assurances on any bill brought to this floor under unanimous consent that that same kind of nonsense is not occurring in these instances? I have a responsibility as the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee to try to defend the integrity of this House, and I will use any opportunity I can to point out how the majority leadership in this House is destroying the principle that this is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world.

How long is the bill? Because, Mr. Speaker, I am tempted to demand that every single bill that comes up tonight be read in its entirety.

I would like to have the bill read.

Mr. Speaker, I will withdraw that request because I did not inform the gentleman ahead of time, and he just happened to get in the line of fire on something he should not have been involved in.

Absolutely.

I am not objecting to any bill, and I am not suggesting you did. What I am doing is using the only avenue available to me since we are operating under some very strange rules in this House to point out that even if these matters had been cleared on both sides of the aisle, there is really no way for the individual Member to protect himself if the leadership of this House is going to depart from what ought to be the custom in this place of not dictating what goes into conference reports.

With all due respect, what does not happen is that the leadership does not abuse its power routinely to alter the contents of conference reports. So I know the gentleman didn't, and I have no objection to the gentleman proceeding. But I wanted to use this as an opportunity to point out that the leadership of this House, starting with the Speaker of the House, is abdicating his responsibility to protect the integrity of this institution.

Mr. Speaker, the Republican leadership of this House has decided that this war-time Defense bill is the proper vehicle to resolve the debate on ANWR. Now, I know this is not the first time that substantive legislation has been added to an appropriations bill, but it is certainly one of the worst.

There is something especially outrageous about the willingness of the majority party leadership to allow the Defense Department bill, in a time of war, to be held hostage to totally unrelated special interest items. The Defense bill should be about delivering equipment and support to our troops. Instead, it is being used to deliver a multibillion dollar bonanza to the oil companies.

That action represents a fundamental corruption of the integrity of the legislative process, in my view. This legislation allows one Senator to grease the skids to allow the passage of ANWR by sprinkling enough money around this bill in selected accounts to buy enough votes in the Senate to ensure passage. I think that ought not happen, but that is what is going to happen if we pass the rule.

I have another objection to what is happening here tonight. I have in my hand 45 pages of language which we were told in writing during the conference would not be included in the conference committee report. This is language which relates to indemnification of the pharmaceutical industry and the establishment of a compensation fund.

What happens under this language is that individuals have their right to sue in case they are made very ill or in case, say someone in their family dies, they lose their right to sue a pharmaceutical manufacturer except when the Secretary finds malfeasance. Instead, they are told that they can have access to a compensation fund, but then there is no money put in the compensation fund. So that means that if you do get sick, you lose your right to sue, but you have to lobby the Congress in order to provide an appropriation in order to provide compensation for your loss.

We were told in writing that that was not going to be in the conference report; and yet Senator Frist walked across the Capitol, walked into the Speaker's office, and Senator Frist and the Speaker demanded that the Republican leadership on the House Appropriations Committee insert that language in the bill. So we are here tonight recognizing that once again the orderly legislative process has been corrupted by a couple of muscle men in the Congress who think that they have a right to tell everybody else that they have to do their bidding.

ANWR does not belong in this bill. This language with respect to the drug companies does not belong in this bill. It ought to be stripped. This rule should be turned down.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to say something that I said earlier this evening when virtually nobody was here: the Republican leadership has decided that this wartime defense bill is the proper vehicle to resolve the debate on ANWR. As I said, this is not the first time that substantive legislation has been added to an appropriations bill, but it is one of the worst occasions I have ever seen.

There is something especially outrageous and callous about the willingness of the majority party leadership to allow the Defense Department bill in a time of war to be held hostage to totally unrelated special interest items. The Defense bill ought to be about delivering equipment and supporting our troops. Instead, it is being used to deliver a multibillion dollar bonanza to the oil companies.

That act represents a fundamental corruption of the integrity of the legislative process. This legislation allows one Senator to grease the skids to allow the passage of ANWR by sprinkling around money in selected accounts in this bill to buy enough votes in the Senate to assure passage.

All year long, the Republican majority has squeezed programs for working people to pay for tax cuts for those most well off in our society. In the process, the House has become an assembly line for special interest legislation. This bill continues that practice. It slashes crucial activities for the government, cutting $8 billion. It cuts $4 billion out of defense. Some people will say, Don't worry about it. We will put it back in the supplemental. If that is the case, then this bill is a fraud. If it is not the case, then we run the risk of not fully funding the needs that we ought to be funding under the Defense bill.

This bill, if you vote for it, will provide $1 billion less than last year for No Child Left Behind education programs.

This bill will cut the Federal share of the support for special education. This bill will cut $63 million out of last year's FBI budget, slashing new hires for counterintelligence by $750 personnel. This bill will cut local law enforcement grants by $315 million below last year. The clean water revolving fund, which was previously cut by 40 percent, is cut another $214 million. Pell grants are cut by $31 million over last year. The Labor-Health-Education bill overall is $1.4 billion below last year and this bill, with the across-the-board cut, means that that bill will be $3 billion less than we provided last year.

I will be offering a recommittal motion to eliminate that across-the- board cut, to eliminate those $8 billion in cuts. But I want to make two other points. We met for 5 hours today and the Senate totally misdescribed the language and the effect of their language as far as ANWR was concerned. I asked the Senate seven different questions about the effect of their language. They were erroneous in each response that they gave to me.

So after the conference was over they had to go back and rewrite that entire section of the bill. Then they told us in writing that there would be no language, no language with respect to indemnification of the pharmaceutical companies, and then they produced 41 pages, 41 pages of language at the last minute at the instruction of the Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader. They said, oh, this was just a last-minute thing. We did not know we were going to have to do it. However, if you look at the documentation, it was prepared at 11:30 yesterday, and I do not mean Sunday, I mean Saturday.

So I want Members of the House to understand what you are doing here is to take away anyone who gets sick or dies, you are taking away their right to sue. You are telling them instead, you can go to the government and get compensation, and then they provide no money in the compensation fund. It is an outrageous rip-off and I wish it were not in the bill, but it is.

So all I want to say is I cannot do anything about that, but I am offering a motion to recommit, as I have just described, and I would urge an ``aye'' vote on the recommittal motion.

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

I most certainly am. I am not opposed to the defense portion of this budget, but I am opposed to the other provisions that I described earlier.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I want to put the House on notice that I intend to ask for a rollcall on this rule. And if we do have a rollcall, I am going to vote against it, and I want to explain why.

One of the bills that this rule makes in order is the continuing resolution. At this point, this Congress has not passed the defense bill. It has not passed the Labor, Health, Education and Social Services appropriations bill. Together that equals about 65 percent of all the discretionary spending in the budget. We still have not passed those bills almost 3 months into the fiscal year.

Now, this resolution will allow the continuing resolution, which expires today, to continue until February 15. Now, it also says that we will not be able to amend the CR. However, there is nothing to prevent the Senate from amending the CR when it goes over there, and I fully expect them to try because they have a different set of priorities than the Republican House leadership. If you do not believe that, just ask Mr. Stevens.

There is another problem with the CR, and that is that it funds both the Defense bill and the Labor, Health, and Education bill at a very much lower level and on a very much more restricted basis than I think is healthy. Example: on the Defense side, if the Defense appropriations bill does not pass, it means that money will trickle out to the military, but they will not be able to do the advanced procurement expenditures that they need if you are going to have intelligent planning.

On the Labor-Health side, what it means, and this is even more serious, I think, because I think there is a better chance that the defense bill may pass, but the Labor-Health bill right now is so inadequate that the majority leader in the Senate cannot get enough votes to pass it. And so now what they are doing is setting up this scenario: they are going to fund Labor-Health programs at a level $1.4 billion below the House-passed bill and $3 billion below last year. And because of the peculiarities of the formula, programs such as the Community Service Block Grants are going to be funded at a level 50 percent below last year. You might as well gut that program if you let that happen.

And why are they doing it? I think the reason they are doing it is because they know they cannot pass that turkey of a Labor-Health bill now as it is, so they are trying to set up a scenario in which in February Senators will have to vote for that inadequate bill in order to escape from the crisis which was manufactured by this inadequate and rigid CR.

I think House Members, if we are going to be asked to pass another CR, ought to have an opportunity to amend it. Coming from an agricultural State, I am told that the agreement just reached between the House and the Senate is going to allow Senator Cochran to put $2 billion wherever he wants it in agriculture, and I would kind of like to see some of that money going to the MILC program. But it is not going to under the way this is set up.

I would also like to amend the funding rate for a number of programs so that you do not indirectly, under the table, without a frontal vote, gut programs like the Community Services Block Grant.

So I want to put the House on notice, despite any agreement at the leadership level, I intend to ask for a rollcall vote because this is nuts.

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, I yield myself 8 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I want Members of the House, at least those who are around, to understand what the controversy has been with respect to this continuing resolution today. Let me back up even further.

As the gentleman has indicated, the House Appropriations Committee was able to pass every bill through the House before we left for the August recess. Despite that fact, for a variety of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the Appropriations Committee, the fact is that, today, we are 2 months into the fiscal year and the Department of Defense and the Departments of Labor, Health, Education and Social Services still have not received their funding for the year under a regular appropriation bill. That means that about 65 percent of the discretionary spending in the budget still has not been tied down for the coming year.

That is not just a problem in Washington. It means that local people cannot plan. It means that school boards cannot plan. It means that the Pentagon cannot plan. And it discombobulates everybody. This is not the first time it has happened, but it is certainly one of the most troubling episodes that we have had in a long time.

I think we are here with so little of this work finished because I really do believe that the leadership of the House has tried to impose an agenda on the House and on the Senate which is so extreme that even members of their own majority party have rebelled. Example: We take a look at what happened on the PATRIOT Act. Example: We take a look at the inability to pass the labor health bill, first in the House and now in the Senate. It seems to me that a little more flexibility on the part of the House leadership could have resolved a lot of those problems.

Anyway, to bring us up to date, 10 minutes before the House opened today, we were informed on this side of the aisle that the continuing resolution to keep the government functioning for these agencies who have not yet received their funding, we received notice that a decision had been made to change the effective date of the continuing resolution, which meant that it would be extended through February 15 rather than simply to the end of the year.

It is one thing to provide a short extension so that the President has the ability to review legislation passed by the Congress before he signs it. It is quite another to try to leverage one group or another into a severe disadvantage with respect to some of this funding.

The problem with extending the CR to February 15 is that it creates a number of anomalies in both funding for the Defense Department and in the funding for the social service agencies which I do not think this Congress wants to be responsible for.

The problem with allowing the Pentagon, for instance, to continue on a CR, which is what would happen, the problem is that, at the levels under this CR, the military would be expected to run out of money for Iraq operations in January. That could create some significant problems for them. In addition, Pentagon contracts could be significantly delayed. Now, that could be overcome if we do manage to pass the Defense Appropriations Bill, and I hope we do, but we still would have a major problem with funding in the Labor-Health-Education bill.

Example: Everybody knows that, just a few days ago, the majority party restored funding to Rural Health Outreach Grants in order to try to overcome their inability to pass the Labor-Health bill earlier in the week. Guess what? The CR before us today takes out that additional money for Rural Health Outreach Grants, and it again returns us to a funding level which is 73 percent below last year. I do not think people want to do that, but that is the result of the continuing resolution.

The Community Services Block Grant Program, under the funding level in this CR, that program is cut in half from last year. The Low Income Heating Assistance Program, we had all kinds of people talking about adding money for that program, and yet under the funding level in this CR, LIHEAP is cut by $176 million. Under No Child Left Behind, under the funding level in this resolution, No Child Left Behind programs would be cut more than $1.1 billion below last year's level.

We have heard a lot of fulminating on both sides of the aisle about IDEA, about special education. Guess what? The funding level for this continuing resolution would freeze IDEA grants.

The International Labor Affairs Bureau, which protects American workers and wages through its efforts to eradicate child labor around the world, would be cut by 87 percent under the funding level in this continuing resolution. Unemployment help for people who are looking for jobs would be cut by $157 million under this continuing resolution level.

Now, it is one thing to say, all right, we will let that go for a week because it simply is a short-term convenience to the President. It is quite another thing to say that we are going to hold those programs to that level of funding through February 15. When you do that, you ruin some of those programs and you make miserable the lives of a lot of people who depend on those programs, which is why we objected on this side of the aisle.

Now that the majority party has returned to the original understanding that the CR will extend only for a week, time for us to get our work done; now that we are in a position where we are not going to be able to conveniently take a vacation until February 15 while these other programs suffer, I am perfectly happy to withdraw my objection.

So I congratulate the gentleman for talking to whoever he had to talk to in order to bring them to their senses.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for the time.

Let me simply make a couple of comments in response to assertions made by the gentlewoman from West Virginia. She caught my attention when she said, and made much of the fact, that since the Republicans have taken control of the House, education funding has essentially doubled. Let me put that in perspective and challenge that statement. This bill is part of a three-part strategy which over the next 5 years will cut funding for education, for social services, for health care, for the people targeted by this bill by $48 billion over a 5-year period.

With respect to education, this bill is the first time in 10 years that the Congress will actually have cut education. With the across- the-board cut which is going to be attached to this bill before

the week is over, we will wind up cutting education by over $600 million below last year.

Now, the Republicans say, ``Oh, that is okay because we added so much money over the last 10 years.'' With all due respect, that is rewriting history. The Republican majority in this House had to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting education at all. They came to power with the demand to abolish the Department of Education. Their very first action rescinded billions of dollars including education funding. They tried three out of the next 4 years to make deep cuts in education. Each time they were blocked by the Democratic minority and by some assistance that we got from the Republican majority in the Senate and from the White House then occupied by Bill Clinton.

Today the fact is that over the past 10 years we have had $18 billion more in education than would have been there if we had passed the Republican House education and labor appropriation bill. So for the Republicans to claim that they have added money to education is a joke.

It reminds me of the orphan who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. The fact is, if the Republican majority in this House had their way, education would have been funded $18 billion less than it has been funded over the previous decade.

With respect to some of the other claims that have been made this morning, with respect to title I, we are going to have an actual reduction in title I by the time the across-the-board cut actually passes. No Child Left Behind programs have been cut by $779 million.

The gentlewoman mentioned NIH. The fact is that with the across-the- board cut that is going to be attached to this bill, NIH funding will decline by $129 million, there will be fewer research grants provided there than we had 2 years ago.

She mentioned community health centers. The fact is that this bill contains $238 million less than the amount requested by the Bush administration, and this bill totally terminates the entire community- access program to provide health care to people who do not have insurance.

So all I would say is, if you vote for this bill, if you vote for the across-the-board cut, and if you voted for the Republican reconciliation action last week, you will have cut support for people who are helped by this bill by $48 billion over the next 5 years, and you will have used 50 percent of that money to put in the pockets of the richest 1 percent of the people by way of tax cuts. It is an outrageous piece of legislation.

Mr. Speaker, let me simply say in response to the gentlewoman's comments, the Republican leadership and the Republican caucus has already made clear that they intend to attach a further 1 percent across-the-board cut in all discretionary spending before we leave here for the Christmas holidays. The fact is that the bill before us today is just for openers. And when you put this bill together with the 1 percent cut that they intend to make across the board, and then when you add that to the humongous cuts that they made over the next 5 years in the reconciliation bill last week, they are already on the hook for that. That means, over the next 5 years, there will be a cumulative cut in programs to help the people targeted by this bill of $48 billion.