Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I am pleased that the gentleman from Kentucky has accepted the Sabo motion, but I want to express a caution. It does the country no good, it does this institution no good if that motion is accepted for purposes of moving us to conference and then discarded the moment we move into conference.

I do not want anybody to vote for this motion to accept today unless they intend to oppose any bill that comes back from conference which short-sheets the funding levels described in the Sabo amendment. To do that would be legislative hypocrisy.

Mr. Speaker, I think a number of things need to be pointed out. This President and this administration have a long history of trying to prevent this Congress from providing all of the funding that we think is necessary to protect Homeland Security. After we were hit by anthrax, and our committee on a bipartisan basis put together a list of crucial additions to the Homeland Security budget, we went down to the White House and tried to show them to the President. Before we could say one word, the President said, ``Well, I want you to know that if you appropriate a dollar more than I have asked for for Homeland Security I will veto the bill,'' without even listening to what it was that we had to say. We had to point out to him that there were four different Federal installations that his own security people had said were under grave threat of terrorist attack, which his budget was not doing one blessed thing to protect, and he still resisted us.

So we had to come back to the Congress and, despite the President's threat of veto, we had to add several billion dollars to the bill that year.

The next year, the President pocket vetoed $1.5 billion in additional funding for Homeland Security that this Congress had provided on a bipartisan basis. Ninety-eight percent of the Republicans and the Democrats in both Houses had voted for those add-ons, yet the President declined to allow that money to go forward.

So today we are still far behind where we should be in protecting our courts, far behind where we should be in protecting the northern border. We have 2,000 fewer inspectors on the northern border than the PATRIOT Act itself said we ought to have.

So I am frankly amazed at the footdragging that this administration has done or has engaged in when it comes to providing adequate funding for these items. We have only 13 percent of America's fire departments who are fully equipped to respond to a full-blown HAZMAT incident. We only have one-third of firefighters per shift who are adequately equipped with self-contained breathing apparatuses, and we still have a minuscule percentage of cargo inspected as they come into our ports.

The gentleman from Kentucky talks about how we have 38 ports we are now trying to put the new Customs system in. There are 38 ports we are trying to get that done in, but it is not done yet. And as far as China is concerned, we are barely off the ground at inspecting the huge amount of cargo that comes into this country from China. So we have huge additional holes.

So I hope this House and this committee will not be disingenuous in accepting this amendment now and then walking away from its requirements as soon as we get to conference later today.

What we have been doing consistently is moving bureaucratic boxes around, rather than providing adequate resources to do the job. What we did 2 years ago on Homeland Security, we had 133 agencies that had something to do with homeland security. This Congress took 22 of them, not including the FBI, not including the CIA, the two most important agencies, we took 22 out of 133 agencies, lumped them together, called that the Homeland Security agency. We still had 111 agencies on the outside looking in. They were not included in the reorganization. As a result, we have a huge percentage of key personnel positions in the Homeland Security agency today that are still not filled, and almost 25 percent of the positions that are filled, are filled with political appointees.

Mr. Speaker, what we have not done, while we have rearranged the boxes, is to provide enough adequate financial resources to this agency. So I hope we are serious in accepting this motion today.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

I have attended a lot of briefings that I have never seen you at, with the CIA, the Homeland Security Agency, and a number of others.

You don't know the briefings I have attended.

Get your facts straight.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Kentucky says that he resents the fact that I have raised some of these shortcomings on the House floor. I am sorry he takes so many things personally. We all recognize that his committee has added $800 million to the administration budget; and as far as it goes, that is fine. But that does not mean that we are meeting the needs of this country.

He likes to talk about things that people do not know, ``classified information.'' Rather than hiding behind that classified information, I would simply say I will tell you what is not classified: the fact that we have fewer air marshals today patrolling the skies than the President and the Congress promised in 2001.

I will tell you what is not classified: the fact that the President of the United States himself said that 40 percent of people who are in this country illegally have overstayed their visas, and yet that backlog of cases has grown by 40,000 a year.

I will tell you something else that is not classified: the gentleman says we need to be fiscally responsible. The President in the debate with Mr. Kerry last week said, ``Well, it is interesting to see how much Mr. Kerry wants to provide for homeland security, but where is he going to get the money?''

I will tell you where we tried to get it. We tried to say, instead of giving people who make $1 million a year a $128,000 tax cut next year, let's cut that back for those folks who make over $1 million and put that money into additional port security, put that money into airline security, put that money into screeners. And do you know what? The gentleman from Kentucky voted against that. So he had a choice between homeland security and additional tax cuts for millionaires, and he made the wrong choice.

Mr. Chairman, I think both the Menendez bill and the core bill are headed in the wrong direction on final passage. I would vote against both of them.

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

Mr. Speaker, it is too bad we are here under these conditions tonight, because the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) tried to bring out a bill which would have met all of the problems all of the parts of the country face. Unfortunately, the gang that cannot shoot straight has called for other ways to deal with the problem, and so we are dealing with only half a bill.

I want to make one point: that I speak not as the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Appropriations, but simply as a Member of Congress from Wisconsin.

One of the deficiencies with this rule is that it does not allow for an amendment to extend the Milk Income Loss Contract program. Now, that program was authorized in the 2002 farm bill. It is currently scheduled to expire next year, while other commodity programs run through the end of the farm bill, September of 2007.

In my view, dairy farmers ought to be treated under the milk program in exactly the same way that farmers of

other major commodities are treated under the farm bill. If Congress fails to extend the milk program through to the end of the farm bill, then dairy farmers across the country will be at a disadvantage when Congress prepares a new authorization in 2007. That is because, under existing budget rules, there will be no budget score for milk, and only the milk price program will appear in the budget baseline. That means the budget baseline for dairy price safety programs will be deceptively low, about $800 million below where it needs to be in order to ensure that dairy farmers are not treated less equitably than they are treated today.

I do not think this Congress ought to allow that to happen, but unfortunately, we are not going to be allowed to try to correct the problem by the rule which is being adopted tonight.

The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Putnam) I notice indicated that the farm bill ought to be used to help farmers. There is one way the Committee on Rules could have done it. They could have helped dairy farmers across the country, but they chose not to do so. I regret that, which is one of many reasons I will be voting against this rule.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Florida (Mr. Boyd).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the minority whip.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Jackson).

(Mr. JACKSON of Illinois asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Kilpatrick).

(Ms. KILPATRICK asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to another distinguished gentleman from Florida (Mr. Davis).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, what has happened on this bill is that after the four disasters that have been referred to this evening, the committee did what we did after the Congress was hit by anthrax a number of years ago. The committee went around to the agencies to try to figure out exactly what it was they needed to fully meet the needs of people who had been hit by these disasters. They went to the Agriculture Department, and the Agriculture Department people unofficially told the Congress what they thought the real level of need was.

There are some 35 States who have legitimate needs that need to be responded to with respect to refurbishing or reconstructing highways that have been damaged. And there are various other needs that will be listed in a chart which I will ask at the proper time to insert in the record following the remarks I am now making.

Essentially, the chairman, his staff and my staff, tried to work out what we thought was a tightly disciplined package to meet legitimate needs being faced in this unprecedented hurricane year. Unfortunately, the way this place has come to work more and more is that people who know the least about problems are the people who often have the most to say about how they are dealt with.

And so, as a result, people who did not go around looking at the damage on the ground, as some of our Florida colleagues did, people who did not have a direct knowledge of the damage that was done and the kind of relief that was needed, they, for ideological reasons, decided that the committee product did not suit their pure idea of what was good and righteous, and so they decided, well, no, that is too much money. So the bill has been scaled back.

Now, as a result of its being scaled back, we are going to have a couple of amendments that are offered in Rube Goldberg fashion which will try to meet some of these legitimate needs by slashing into funds that meet other Americans' legitimate needs in programs ranging from agriculture conservation to cancer research. So we will be asked to vote for a bill which, as the gentleman from Florida indicated, may be good as far as it goes, but it sure does not go very far given the real need.

Now, this damage did not occur in my district, but there have been times when it did, and I know how badly we needed that help. And I know when my farmers were hit with droughts how badly they needed that help. And if we cannot remember what it was like when our constituents were hit with this kind of problem, then we cannot expect other Members to remember when we have a problem.

So I regret the fact that we have this half-a-loaf approach. I assume people will vote for it in the end because it is about all that we can get out of the system, but this, again, is a sorry mess. This Congress has not hesitated to provide $128,000 tax cuts to people making a million bucks a year. But, oh, if you are a farmer who was hit by drought or if you are a property owner hit by hurricane damage or if you are a town chairman trying to deal with your road problem, sorry, buddy, you take second place, you take third place, you can sit in the caboose. We have to put that millionaire in the front seat, first class.

That is essentially what this Congress has done on program after program all year long. We should not be surprised they would do it again tonight. It is too bad, but there is not much we can do about it because the powers that be in this place have decided this is the way it is going to be.

Mr. Chairman, may I ask how much time remains?

Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), committee chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds.

Mr. Chairman, I agree with the gentleman. That is what I meant when I said that the way this House is being run these days, the people who know the least about these things are evidently being given the opportunity to do the most about them, which is backwards in terms of my understanding of the legislative body.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

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

Mr. Chairman, what is happening on this floor tonight is blatant, obvious, raw politics. That is all it is.

The Republican majority leadership is bringing a bill to the floor which has over $10 billion in aid to various areas of the country. No offsets. No offsets at all. But when on this side of the aisle we are trying to deal with disaster problems for farmers on an equal footing with the hurricane disasters that we have just had in Florida and other States, then we are told, Oh, no. All of a sudden a new rule has to apply.

I would say to the gentleman from Nebraska that is like saying that in an Oklahoma-Nebraska football game, Oklahoma has to go 200 yards for a touchdown while Nebraska only has to go 100 yards. It just is not fair. It is not square.

I would make another point. Even if we were going to have offsets, this is a ``let's pretend'' offset. This is a phony offset, because if we take a look at the scoring by the beloved Congressional Budget Office, which the majority party used to stick with, come hell or high water, if we take a look at this, there is no offset whatsoever in the first fiscal year, zero savings by this ``let's pretend'' offset.

In the second year there is a $56 million savings out of a $2.8 billion cost. Who are they kidding?

This is a political maneuver. This is not a financial or budgetary offset. It is a joke. And if it did not do so much damage to farmers, I would laugh at it. Over 3 years, it provides only one-tenth the offset that is required to meet the standard budget rules around here.

What we have got here tonight is not an offset, it is a political shell game, and the problem is that shell game results in sticking it to farmers. Shame on you.

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

Mr. Chairman, I would simply like to point out some of the budget reductions which will be caused by this amendment: The National Institutes of Health would be cut by $884 million from the House-passed bill.

The Centers For Disease Control, who told us yesterday we have a crisis on our hands with respect to childhood influenza, this amendment would cut $136 million from the House-passed bill for that agency.

Head Start, this amendment would cut $214 million, $10 million below last year's level.

The Low Income Heating Assistance Program, LIHEAP, would be cut $62 million from the House level.

The Federal Aviation Administration, they would be funded nearly one- half billion dollars below the fiscal 2004 level.

Education would be cut by $1.8 billion below the House-passed labor- health bill.

No Child Left Behind would be cut by $440 million. The vice president last night in the debate talked about the importance of that program.

Title I grants would be cut by $414 million.

Special education, which both political parties posed for holy political pictures on for the last 4 years, that program is being cut by $400 million.

Pell Grants, the President at the national convention talked about the need to expand Pell Grants. This would cut Pell Grants, would exacerbate the shortfall by $300 million.

The FBI would be cut $161 million, including personnel resources for the Office of Intelligence and counterterrorism field investigations.

NASA would be cut.

National parks would be cut by $70 million, meaning a layoff of some 800 park rangers and maintenance staff.

Nuclear nonproliferation programs, which both presidential candidates said last week were their number one concern, would be cut by $40 million.

Law enforcement assistance would be cut by $81 million.

This is a family-friendly amendment? Give me a break.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I think, as the gentleman has so aptly indicated already, the best way that this bill can be described is to put it in the terms that the old Bowery Boys used to say in those B movies many years ago when we were both kids, when Leo Gorcey would say ``dis don't do nuthin' to nobody.'' That is exactly what this legislation does. It ``don't do nuthin' to nobody.''

It is here simply because, evidently, the folks who are on the Committee on the Budget do not, as the gentleman from Florida indicates, understand how the OMB goes about dealing with or enforcing and implementing the continuing resolutions which we pass. Somehow, it seems that the Committee on the Budget or perhaps only the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, I do not know, it seems that they feel that, without this language, OMB will go on a spending spree.

Well, the fact is that what this legislation says is that OMB cannot do something which OMB is already not planning to do. The interpretation that is always given to the continuing resolution by the Committee on Appropriations and by OMB is that the most conservative approach must be used for obligating funds under a CR. Notwithstanding that interpretation, the Committee on the Budget is having its version of a heart attack, suggesting that somehow the continuing resolution, which the gentleman brought to the floor last week, is going to result in runaway spending.

As the gentleman from Florida says, while it pretends to reign in OMB, this resolution will not result in one dime less being spent than would have been the case with the CR that passed the House last week.

I guess all I would say is that I find it interesting that 2 weeks before the end of the fiscal year, when this Congress has still not passed a single domestic appropriations bill, because the bills that were passed in this body have not been accepted by those in the other body, and at a time when we still do not have a transportation bill out of the authorizing committee, at a time when so many pieces of legislation are tied up between the House and the Senate, this House has been asked to waste a good amount of time on the budget process reform bill, which the Committee on the Budget insisted on bringing to the floor earlier in the year, which did a ``brilliant'' job of passing so-called budget reform legislation which guaranteed that Members could continue to do anything whatsoever that they wanted to do on the tax side of the ledger without having to take into account one iota what it did to the deficit. Now we are being asked to pass this meaningless piece of fluff.

It does not matter whether Members vote ``yes'' or ``no'' on this resolution. The result will be the same. So I guess if it makes the chairman of the Committee on the Budget happy, the House may as well go ahead and pass it, but do not deceive yourself into thinking that it does something for or to anybody. It does not.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 6\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 8 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, the basic job of Congress is to pass the annual budget and appropriation bills in order to keep the government running and to fund the most important functions of government. To do that under our processes, we are first supposed to pass a budget resolution which sets the outline for spending for the coming year, and then we are supposed to follow that on by passing 13 appropriation bills which fill in the blanks in detail.

This continuing resolution is here because, on the domestic side of the budget, none of that has happened. We have passed only one of the 13 appropriation bills that were supposed to pass by the end of the fiscal year. That is for the Department of Defense. But even other national security bills have not been passed, and certainly, nothing has been passed that meets our obligations on the domestic side of the ledger.

The majority party controls this body by a very narrow margin. Ordinarily, if this institution were being run in a rational way, that would mean that the majority leadership would try to reach out, broaden its base of support for basic legislation by making an occasional compromise here and there so that we can broaden the number of people who are willing to support whatever products they bring to the floor. That has not happened either.

When I chaired this committee, we had a bipartisan allocation between the 13 subcommittees. Both parties agreed on how much should go into each of those 13 appropriation bills. That is why we were able that year to finish every single appropriation bill by the end of the fiscal year. The minority has not been afforded that opportunity this year because the majority leadership has been held captive by the most extreme members of the majority party caucus. As a result, they have produced highly ideological appropriation bills which have provided little incentive for other members of their own party to support those bills.

The domestic appropriations have been so stingy in the area of education, in the area of health care, in the area of veterans' health, in the area of law enforcement, and in the area of transportation that their Republican counterparts in the Senate have not wanted to pass those bills. If we take a look at the appropriation bills that have passed the Senate, those bills contain about $7 billion more on the domestic side of the ledger than the appropriation bills in this House. We could probably have reached bipartisan agreement if that $7 billion had been made available here. But oh, no, it was so necessary for the majority party to preserve every single dollar to provide $128,000 tax cuts for people who make a million bucks a year that they were not willing to provide additional funding in the area of health and education and the like.

So now we have what I call a duck-and-run approach to governance. The majority party does not want a vote on the level of veterans' health care funding, so the veterans' appropriation bill is not even coming to the floor. And the majority party is avoiding having to choose between the wishes on the Senate side and the wishes on the House side by simply going to a continuing resolution which ducks all of these questions until after the election. This strategy is being followed either by design or as the result of sheer incompetence, and I am not sure which.

I want to make it clear, as did the minority whip, that that does not apply to the gentleman who chairs the committee. He got every single bill out of his committee on time and passed them out of the House except for VA/HUD, and even though they were extremely short on necessary funding, on the minority side, we indicated that even though we strenuously objected to the stringent limitation of funding in a number of areas, we still procedurally cooperated with the majority party to toss those bills over to the Senate in the hopes that rationality would prevail and we would wind up with a product that could be supported when those bills came by the conference.

But at this point, I guess the bill that passed the House last week is a perfect metaphor for this session, because there was an internal triangular fight within the majority party in this House on that transportation bill, and, as a result, we passed a transportation bill that had been stripped of aid to states for highways, it had been stripped of the mass transit programs, it had been stripped of the funding for airport construction and development. So the only thing left in the transportation bill was the title of the bill.

If you take a look at other legislation, national parks, the President made a promise when he campaigned 4 years ago that he would send down a 5-year plan to attack the maintenance backlog in our national parks. Well, it is 4 years later, folks, and what has happened? The President and this Congress have provided only 12 percent of the funding needed to meet those backlog needs.

As the gentleman from Maryland indicated, we have done nothing to deal with the problems of 45 million Americans who have no health insurance. We have done nothing to expand Pell grants, even though the President in

his spectacularly disingenuous performance at the Republican Convention told the world that we needed more money for Pell grants, even though his administration has blocked the increase in Pell grants for the last 2 years.

So, Mr. Speaker, the fact that this continuing resolution is here today is a monument to ideological zealotry. It is also a monument to institutional failure. This Congress is failing to meet even the most basic and minimal expectations that the country has for it by way of doing our routine business. This is governing in a pitiful way, and I wish that I could say something more positive about it, but, indeed, I cannot.

We have no choice but to vote for this resolution in order to keep the government functioning, but this is a pitiful way to run a railroad or a legislative body.

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

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

For the moment I am, yes.

Mr. Speaker, if Members oppose this motion to recommit, they will deny 28,165 renovated homes for military families throughout the military housing privatization initiative. If they oppose this motion to recommit, they will deny many of America's veterans access to VA health care, which ought to be their right. This motion would provide an additional $2.5 billion above the President's request to help cut waiting lists, renovate crumbling VA facilities and ensure timely quality health care for America's veterans.

The FBI is the Nation's lead agency for domestic counterterrorism, yet it is the only component of our national security apparatus that will not have its funding for fiscal year 2005 in place. The motion would ensure that the FBI gets its funding now, not later.

Failure to pass this motion to recommit would also shut down the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the Terrorist Screening Center. Neither received funding in last year's spending bill, so neither would have their funding extended by the continuing resolution without this motion.

The motion to recommit, Mr. Speaker, would also eliminate the nearly $1 billion in special student loan subsidies being paid to lenders that instead could be put to better use by helping students and families afford a college education. This House passed that amendment earlier this month on the Labor-HHS bill in the form of the Kildee amendment.

Also, Mr. Speaker, failure to pass this motion to recommit would deny health insurance to 750,000 children who could be covered under the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP. Currently $1.1 billion of SCHIP funds are available to States to provide health insurance to children. These funds were accumulated while the SCHIP programs were just being organized, but current law requires that these funds be returned to the Treasury if they are not used by October 1. With more than 8 million children lacking health coverage, it makes sense to give States more time to use these funds and enroll children in the SCHIP programs. We ought not be robbing these funds from children's health insurance programs because of an arbitrary deadline.

We also by this motion would provide additional funding for education and health care programs funded by the Labor-HHS-Education bill. We ask that in each case in the education and health area that this bill be adjusted to reflect the higher of the numbers between the House and the Senate bill. The result of that, for instance, would be to add $367 million to NIH to maintain momentum in research on diseases like cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, et cetera. We also would try to deal with the section 7 small business loan program that was dealt with by this House on a similar motion several weeks ago.

Mr. Speaker, I would urge support for the motion to recommit.

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 demand a recorded vote.

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

Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask the gentleman from Oklahoma a question.

We have had five or six amendments adopted, the Van Hollen amendment, the Davis amendment on Cuba, the Lee amendment on Cuba, the Waters amendment on Cuba, the Stenholm amendment on debt ceiling and, I believe, one other. Last year, we had the experience of seeing a good many amendments which had been adopted on this floor to this and several other bills evaporate as soon as they went to conference.

I would like to know whether the gentleman can assure us that he will insist on retaining each of these amendments and will not bring this bill back from conference if these amendments do not stay in the conference this year.

I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his candor.

Let me say this, Mr. Chairman, I had originally been willing to support this bill as it came out of committee, even though many of us on this side of the aisle thought the bill woefully inadequate in terms of funding levels for various transportation accounts. But the majority has been in a three-cornered feud with itself. The authorizing committee and a number of others in the majority party caucus, for different reasons, have shredded this bill. They have knocked out, at this point, highway aid to the States. They have knocked out mass transit. They have knocked out funding for airport construction. They have knocked out 80 percent of the Department of Transportation funds that originally were contained in this bill.

In addition to that, we have received no assurance whatsoever that the amendments that the House adopted would be retained in conference. In fact, we have essentially been told, because of the presidential threat of a veto, that these amendments will once again be stripped in the conference. That means that virtually all of the action that occurred on this floor has been meaningless with respect to the items that were debated today and late last night.

I am certainly willing to meet my responsibilities to help move bills forward, even if I do not always agree with their content, provided the majority party itself takes its duty seriously. But if the majority party itself, if the majority party leadership itself will not defend their own legislative product as it comes out of the committee, I certainly do not see why I should, especially when House actions, given the arbitrary action of the authorizing committee, have turned this bill into a cadaver.

So, at this point, I intend to vote ``no,'' because I am not going to vote for a bill which effectively cuts more than half the dollar resources out of this bill and which effectively cuts 80 percent of the transportation funding out of the bill just because some people in this House happen to think that committee jurisdiction is more important than being responsible.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and let me simply say that I am not only concerned with the Cuba provisions, I am very much concerned with the transportation items. And I am not about to go on record voting for a bill which has cut these bills, in essence, almost 80 percent below last year's level in terms of transportation items.

I have seen the majority party's campaign committee play games with that too often, and I do not expect to see ads run against Members of the Congress because they voted for a product which the majority party itself is asking them to vote for. That has happened too many times for me to be suckered by that one.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I would just observe the gentleman said this is a good bill. There is not anything left of this bill except the enacting clause; that is in great shape. Outside of that, it is a hollow shell.

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

In its present form, I certainly am.

Mr. Speaker, last week during consideration of this bill, three factions of the majority party took turns in striking entire accounts out of this bill.

More than half the budgetary resources that had been in the bill are now missing.

More than 80 percent of the Department of Transportation's resources have been deleted from this bill. This bill is now missing more than $41 billion in funding that was supposed to flow to each of our States for highways, transit and aviation.

My motion to recommit the Department of Transportation programs and provides adequate funding for addressing the Nation's transportation needs. This motion asks that the Committee on Appropriations restore the accounts that were deleted by points of order, and it calls for increased funding above the committee-reported levels for highways, transit, new start projects, Amtrak and Grants-in-Aid for airports.

It restores funding for rural airports through the Essential Air Service Program, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Surface Transportation Board.

The motion is important because without it we are simply not meeting some of the crucial transportation needs of the country.

Mr. Speaker, I am sure that my friend from Oklahoma will say that because of the form of this motion that this bill will effectively be delayed or killed. The fact is, that is not correct. This bill is already dead. This bill is already on the way to the morgue. It quit breathing last Friday. All I am trying to do is to resuscitate the bill and make it something other than a cadaver.

So, without this motion, this House is acquiescing in the fact that jurisdictional arguments between committees have resulted in a bill which has little more than the enacting title, and I do not think that it does very much credit to the House.

If you vote for this amendment, you will be voting to resuscitate the programs that were knocked out because of the willfulness of the authorizing committee last week, and I would urge a ``yes'' vote for the proposition.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

All of that can be solved by simply having the Committee on Rules this time do its duty and report out a rule that protects a rational bill.

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. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I am confused. I thought that the rules of this House required Members to address the contents of the amendment under discussion. Now, the purpose of this amendment, as I understand it, is to allow families to be reunited more than once every 3 years, and yet we have heard a number of voices on the Republican side of the aisle address a very different question. I must assume that they have not read the amendment; and for any of them for whom it would help, I would be happy to read the amendment again.

But based on the comments that I have heard, for instance, from the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), according to the gospel by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay), we are supposed to oppose this amendment because Castro is a bad fellow.

Well, I find it interesting that because of our dislike for Fidel Castro, who will either eventually die or fall of his own weight, because of our dislike of Mr. Castro, this Congress is being told that we are supposed to say to a person living in the United States who wants to visit his wife or his daughter or his brother, sorry, but because we do not like Castro, we are going to take it out on you and we are not going to allow your family to see each other more than once every 3 years.

Now, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay) may think that is consistent with family values. Some of the other majority Members of this House may think that is consistent with family values. I think that is a gross perversion of politics. We are letting our political dislike for Mr. Castro impact negatively the family yearnings of individual Americans and Cubans.

To me, that is a fundamentally immoral position for our government to take, and I just have to again ask Members, before they get up on this floor on this amendment and bloviate about how much they dislike Mr. Castro, I would simply suggest they read the amendment and ask whether or not they think it is morally justified, because they dislike Mr. Castro so much, to take their dislike out on the victims of Castro, which are the families who are split up and who, unless this amendment is passed, will continue to be in a position where the politicians in Washington decide that they know better than individual family members who do not give a rip about politics and are simply trying to figure out ways to see their loved ones.

This is an incredibly disgraceful performance.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I am sure they care about politics, but I am sure they do not care for the fact that some Members of this House seem to care more about politics than they do those Cuban families.

With all due respect, I was not referring to myself. I was referring to you.

Mr. Chairman, the issue is very simple. When someone who lives in Florida wants to go to his wife's funeral or visit a family Member who is deathly sick, the question is whose judgment should prevail, the judgment of that individual constituent or the judgment of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Lincoln Diaz-Balart).

I think the answer is clear.

Mr. Speaker, I intend to vote against the previous question on the rule. I intend to vote against the rule. And if the House does what I think it is going to do on this bill in the next 2 days, I intend to vote against the bill as well.

The gentleman from New York (Mr. Reynolds) indicates that the Committee on Appropriations has done its job. That is correct. But what is happening now, the Committee on Appropriations is trying even though we are at the end of the fiscal year and even though many of the programs that we are supposed to appropriate money for have not yet been authorized because of failure of the authorization process, the Committee on Appropriations is going to see its product shredded because of the inability of the authorizing committee and the White House and the majority leadership in both the Senate and the House to get together on a reasonable compromise, which hopefully would also include Members of the minority.

And so now what is happening is that a rule is being produced which is theoretically an open rule, but which in reality will result in about 80 percent of this bill being shredded. The carcass of this bill will then go to conference, and in conference the Committee on Appropriations will be asked to reconstruct the legislation which will have been shredded on the House floor. No individual member will have any input into what the final product that comes out of conference will be.

The reason we have a Committee on Rules is to avoid this kind of chaos. The reason we have a Committee on Rules is to bring adult supervision to the House floor from time to time, and the fact is that the Committee on Rules is being derelict in its duty and the House leadership is being derelict in its duty when it does not step in to resolve what Dick Bolling used to call these dung hill fights between different committees. Dick Bolling used to bemoan the fact that Members of this House seemed to think that they had a greater obligation to their committee than they do to the House as a whole. They do not. At least they should not.

We were not elected to be members of the Committee on Appropriations or members of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure or members of the Committee on Rules. We were elected to be Members of the House of Representatives, and it is our job to sometimes defend the House against the arbitrary actions of individual committees. And when the Committee on Rules does not step in to guarantee that, then the result is chaos.

That is what we are going to see here today. We are going to have three different factions of the majority party each trying to impose its own will by taking advantage of the fact that the Committee on Rules did not do its job. So in protest, I mean, we only have about 2 weeks before the end of the fiscal year. We only have passed one appropriations bill. And in my view it is this lack of leadership which has resulted in this miserable record of performance or rather miserable record of nonperformance on the part of the House of Representatives on appropriations issues.

The Committee on Appropriations on both sides of the aisle has worked and worked and worked to try to overcome an inability to perform on the part of other committees, and yet the product that the committee has tried to produce is going to be shredded today because the leadership did not pull people in and knock their heads together to get them to act like adults. That is nothing new around here, but I wish to God it would not be routine.

I found the gentleman's response interesting, Mr. Speaker. He starts to talk about taxes. This bill and my position on it has nothing whatsoever to do with taxes. It has everything to do with the fact that the leadership on your side of the aisle will not meet their responsibility in choosing which individual Members they are going to discipline in order to bring a coherent piece of legislation to the floor. This has nothing to do with tax levels.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, that is absolutely correct. The majority knows it but they try to hide it at every opportunity because they do not have the guts to take the issue on directly.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, that is also absolutely correct.

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

Mr. Chairman, I would like to make a couple of observations, in a sense give a progress report on what has happened on this bill so far, given what the Rules Committee did in exposing this bill to these points of order. There are a lot of things that have happened to this bill so far, but I would like to simply talk about the values that have led the House at this point to strike certain programs from the bill, while not striking others.

As I understand the actions that have been taken so far by points of order raised by Members of the majority, as I understand it, we have so far eliminated formula highway grants to the States; we have done serious damage to the essential airline service for small rural airports; we have done significant damage to FAA grants for airports, all of which will impact States' and localities' ability to develop their economies. But let me describe something that has not been eliminated from this bill.

This bill still contains--and it is interesting that this provision was not stricken by any of those who lodged their motions--this bill contains a provision that extends government-offered reduced rate insurance for airlines operating in the domestic United States. Premiums are set under that program at no more than twice what commercial rates were 3 years ago. This means that airlines only pay about one-fifth what they would pay if they were forced to obtain their insurance from the private sector.

My understanding is that this year airlines will pay about $150 million for government-subsidized risk insurance as opposed to $700 million they would have to pay on the open market. So, once again, we are keeping a let-us-pretend industry afloat, an industry which for all practical purposes is bankrupt. All you have to do is watch what has happened with USAir, I do not know how many times USAir, Continental will go bankrupt before they are bankrupt; but all you have to do is watch that to understand that if you are big enough in this society, you have a safety net created which holds you up no matter how many times you tend to fall. But we do not provide that same kind of safety net to average workers in this country.

What it demonstrates, for instance, is that the Federal Government is now willing to provide this huge subsidy in order to provide insurance to big airline corporations around the world or around the country, at the same time that this Congress continuously refuses to provide health insurance for 45 million Americans. I find that distinction interesting. I do not find it surprising, given the values of this Congress that I have come to expect, unfortunately; but it does say something about our national priorities.

If we are willing to exempt from our parliamentary purity our concern about language in this bill when it affects some of the big industries in the country, but we are not willing to skip over it when it comes to inconveniencing and damaging State economies and the transportation ability of small units of government, I find it especially interesting that while the Congress continues to deny actions that would provide health insurance for the 45 million Americans who do not have it, and every time we talk about doing that work we are being for socialized medicine; yet we are willing to socialize risk when it comes to insurance costs for the airline industry. That is a great set of values, isn't it?

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

Mr. Chairman, I would like to note my agreement with the comments of the distinguished gentleman from Florida. Even before this bill came to the floor, we were faced with the prospect of having a miserable record in producing appropriation bills and finishing them before the end of the fiscal year before we go home to face our constituents in the new elections.

The House has passed all but, I believe, two appropriation bills, this one and the VA-HUD bill. And many of the bills that have passed have, I think, been in pitiful shape, but at least they have passed. None of them, except Defense, has been signed into law.

This bill was at least on track to pass in inadequate though meaningful form before we leave here for the election, but now, as the gentleman from Florida has said, we are facing an even bleaker situation. We are going to leave here in October with even less of the people's business done than would have been the case if this debacle had not occurred on the floor today.

What has happened is essentially this: The transportation authorizing committee, the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, or the No Transportation, No Infrastructure Committee, as it probably ought to be called, their basic highway authorization, for instance, expired 9 months ago. They have not yet been able to renew that basic legislation. The reason for that is that they have a three-corner debate going with themselves.

There is a debate between the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure members in the House, those in the Senate, and the wizards in the White House Budget Office, and none of them want to give. So, as a result, what do we have here? The authorizing committee has not been able to get its job done, so the Committee on Appropriations has tried to at least keep these programs afloat while we continue to go through this Little League debate between the White House and the authorizers.

But in fact now I guess the situation is that if the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure cannot pass their legislation, they do not want anybody else to pass meaningful legislation either, or perhaps they somehow think they are producing leverage for themselves by shredding this bill. This is, as I said earlier, this is a sad case.

My great friend and mentor Dick Bolling, who used to be the chairman of the Committee on Rules, and in my view is the greatest Member of this body who never became Speaker. Dick Bolling used to deride Members who practiced what he called dung hill politics, Members who were more interested in protecting the jurisdiction of their own committee than they were in protecting the legislative reputation and record of the House as a whole.

What we have seen today is a sad, sad example of what Dick Bolling worried about when he referred to that practice of ``dung hill politics.'' I wish the House were in a more mature mood, and I wish that the leadership had led so we could have avoided this point today.

There is no point, in my view, in proceeding further with this bill. I intend to vote against it on final passage because there will be nothing left of it except the title. We have a motion around here called ``striking the enacting clause.'' Instead, I suggest today we should probably strike everything except the enacting clause because we will have almost done that by the time we get to the last page of this bill. All we will have done is waste a day and a half of the House's time when we could have been dealing with more serious business, and that, indeed, is a shame.

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, at this point, this bill looks like an accident that started out to happen to somebody else.

I would like to ask one question of the gentleman from Oklahoma. It is my understanding that, with this unanimous consent agreement, that Members can count on the fact that the last vote on this bill will begin at noon tomorrow. It is my understanding that the leadership intends to bring up a suspension bill after consideration of this bill but that the last vote on this bill will start around noon tomorrow. Is that not correct?

I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

Mr. Speaker, with that understanding, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, we now have 8 million people out of work. There are 3 million people that have been out of work so long that they have lost their unemployment benefits, and the majority party in this Congress has steadfastly refused to allow us to do something about that by providing extended unemployment benefits for those workers.

At the same time, for people who are working and people who are not, we have a resurrection of inflation. Inflation is running at twice the rate this year that it ran last year. That means it cost families more to pay for gas, more to pay for health care, more to pay for college costs, and it will continue to rise.

Working families need every dollar in their take-home pay that they can possibly get, and yet the administration

has chosen this time to institute new regulations which for the first time in 50 years scaled back workers' entitlement to overtime pay for overtime worked.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment attempts to do two things. It is a very simple amendment. It simply precludes the agency from using any funds in this bill to implement those limiting regulations. We make one exception. We allow the expansion of overtime rights made available under the new rule for workers making between $8,000 and $23,660 to stand as is. But we effectively block enforcement of the other portions of the rule.

It just seems to me that the Labor Department, the White House, and the Congress should not be complicit in the effort of employers to chisel on workers' overtime pay. If this amendment does not pass, more than 900,000 employees without a college or graduate degree will be exempt from overtime pay because of definitions of professional employees. Thirty thousand nursery school and Head Start teachers will lose their right to overtime pay. Nearly 90,000 computer employees, funeral directors and licensed embalmers will become exempt and lose their right to pay under the Labor Department rule, and there are many other workers as well who will lose their overtime rights.

Mr. Chairman, this is a very simple amendment. Everyone understands it. This House has already voted on a motion to instruct to adopt precisely the same language we are offering today, and the Senate has already adopted the same proposal in the form of the Harkin amendment.

Despite that fact, the Republican leadership arbitrarily stripped that language out from the conference report last year. This time around we mean business. We mean to see this through. We will not be dissuaded by blackmail threats on the part of the White House that they will veto the bill if this provision which we are offering today is included.

It is very simple. If you are on the side of a worker's right to get overtime pay for overtime worked, you vote for this amendment. If you are not on their side, then you vote against this amendment, or you vote for some other mugwump fig leaf that will serve not to cover workers, but simply to cover the fannies of Members who will be voting this afternoon.

point of order

Mr. Chairman, I do.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment does what it says. This amendment is a straightforward limitation which prohibits the Department of Labor from using funds in the act to implement any change to overtime regulations that were in effect on July 14, 2004, with one exception. It imposes no additional duties on the Secretary of Labor, nor does it change existing law since the language merely says that funds may not be used to change overtime regulations in place on July 14, 2004.

Moreover, the amendment allows, but does not require, the Department to implement or administer section 541.6 of the overtime regulation published in the Federal Register on April 23, 2004.

The Department has a duty to know its own regulations; and, therefore, the amendment imposes no new duties. The limitation applies only to the appropriation under consideration in this bill and is operable only for the fiscal year for which the appropriations apply. I, therefore, ask the Chair not to sustain the point of order.

Mr. Chairman, I stand on my statement and ask that the Chair not sustain the point of order.

I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I never fully appreciated until this moment the immense talent of the gentleman from Ohio, but listening to what he said, I must take my hat off to him because he certainly qualifies for the Nobel Prize for fiction. That is an amazing accomplishment in this House, given the competition for that award.

I simply want to say that if you take a look at the Congressional Research Service analysis of this amendment, they make quite clear, quote, `` A review of applicable principles of administrative procedure and pertinent judicial precedents indicates that the Department of Labor would have the authority to immediately reimplement overtime compensation regulations in effect prior to August 23, 2004, upon passage of the proposed Obey-Miller rider.''

That means that they can on their own volition reinstitute those rules within 1 day. To suggest that they would not do so suggests that they are patently irresponsible.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, let me simply say, I understand the gentleman is trying to make a point, but the fact is, as the sponsor of the amendment, I will state categorically that legally the administration has the authority to reimpose those regulations within 1 day. And to suggest that they would not and leave the case that the gentleman is talking about is to suggest that they are even more irresponsible than I think they are.

Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, the CRS memo states that the general rule requiring publication of a final rule not less than 30 days before its effective date may likewise be voided ``as otherwise provided by the agency for good cause found and published with the rule.''

That means that they can reinstitute those rules on their own volition in 1 day.

I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve a point of order against the amendment, and I would ask the gentleman from Ohio if he intends to claim the time in opposition to the amendment. If he does not, then I would like to claim the time.

I do, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Kildee), ranking member on the subcommittee with jurisdiction.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Kennedy).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller).

Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Berkley).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone).

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

Mr. Chairman, a few years ago I endured efforts to recall me because I steadfastly supported the principle of tribal sovereignty, and I do not regret that. I think I took the right position. But I am opposed to this amendment because of something that happened in Wisconsin several years ago. One of the tribes in my district contracted out for the operation of a casino to a private operator. That private operator had some very strange rules. One of the rules when women were hired was very blunt: Put out or get out. It was an outrageous way to deal with female employees, but we had no way to reach into that situation and protect those women workers because the State compacts did not provide protection under such circumstances.

I do not ever want that to happen again to any woman working anywhere in my State or any other State in the Union. That is why I believe that the correct vote on this amendment is to vote against this amendment because the last time I looked, the United States Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law to every citizen; and I am not about to suggest that in cases of casinos, for instance, on or off reservation, that the people who work for those casinos are not going to be entitled to the protection which they need in order to experience decent working conditions.

I think a Congress that cannot protect women in those circumstances is a Congress that is impotent, and I do not believe Congress ought to be impotent in those situations, so I urge a ``no'' vote on the amendment.

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

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I certainly agree with the gentleman's comments. I have great respect and affection for the gentleman from Texas. I know that he believes what he believes deeply, and I respect that. But I just would have to say that I wish we were at the stage in this country in terms of our recognition of mental illness, I wish we were at the stage in this country where we could provide every child with the opportunity to be screened, so that we can catch ahead of time developing problems and help families who otherwise have nowhere to turn.

I join with the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula) in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I would simply like to assure the gentleman of my agreement with his comments. I think that we have become incredibly arrogant in assuming that we have conquered these virus- borne diseases and other communicable diseases. In fact, we are learning that we are going to be facing a whole new generation of threats to public health, and I think even with this additional money in the bill, there needs to be much, much more.

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

Mr. Chairman, I would like to explain to the House why there will not be a recommittal motion.

Mr. Chairman, I voted to report this bill from subcommittee and full committee to the House in order to give the House an opportunity to make some hard choices, but I had frankly expected to vote against the bill for all of the reasons listed in the minority views in the committee report beginning on page 281, and I submit for the Record at this point the minority views signed onto by the Democratic members of the subcommittee which outline in some detail what we consider to be the shortcomings of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, a few minutes ago we heard one of the speakers on the majority side of the aisle talk about this bill in terms of being a bill which meets our promises. I am not quite sure what bill she was referring to, but it certainly could not have been this one because this bill is a monument to broken promises and is an embarrassment to the institution, in my view, if this institution pretends that it cares about making the long-term investments in our economy and in our kids that are necessary.

If you take a look at what this bill does not produce, this bill falls $9.5 billion below the promises in the No Child Left Behind Act of just 3 years ago for Title I alone, which is the major program by which we attack poor education systems for disadvantaged children. For Title I alone, this bill is $7 billion short of the promises laid out in the No Child Left Behind Act.

Special education: Both political parties posed for political holy pictures in terms of how much we are going to try to do for handicapped children, and yet this bill provides $2.5 billion less than the Republicans promised in their own budget of just 1 year ago.

Then if we look at Pell grants, I was so flabbergasted, I practically fell onto the floor when I saw the President of the United States speak to the Republican convention and talk about his determination to increase Pell grants, when, in fact, the majority has frozen Pell grants for 2 years in a row, and this bill is part of that freezing process. So Pell grants have been frozen while tuition has gone up at the average 4-year university by almost 17 percent in that same time period.

In the Department of Labor, we have almost a million and a half fewer private sector jobs than we had 4 years ago, and yet this legislation cuts help for people making a job search through State agencies by 10 percent.

The Community Access Program, which attempts to provide access to decent health care for poor people, is eliminated. The After School Center Program, which is an effort to see to it that kids do not go home to an empty nest after they finish the school day and can still receive some meaningful instruction, that program is frozen. NIH, National Institutes of Health, which do the basic research on all disease: smallest increase in 19 years. Now these cuts are not necessitated, as was indicated on the majority side, because we are at war; these cuts are necessitated because the majority has decided that their top priority is to provide people who make a million dollars a year with a $127,000 tax cut next year. That is why these squeezes are made necessary.

So, Mr. Speaker, I am going to ask the House to vote against the previous question on the rule so that we can offer an amendment that would shave those tax cuts for millionaires from $127,000 to a mere $89,000. I do not know how they will be able to get along with a mere $89,000 tax cut, the poor devils, but they are just going to have to do it. We are going to try to shave that tax cut for the most well-off people in this society so we can continue to meet our obligation to the least well-off people in our society.

What is at stake, in my view, is whether or not this Congress is willing to slowly shred the safety net for the middle class, or whether we are going to continue to build that safety net. I want to be able to offer an amendment which will restore $5.5 billion more to education, which will invest $200 million more in workforce training, invest an additional $1.6 billion to provide more assistance to the 45 million people without health care, and make a series of other adjustments that will make this a far more progressive and humane bill. The only way we can do that is if we defeat the motion on the previous question on the rule. I would urge the House to do just that when the opportunity comes in just a few moments.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds.

I will include at this point in the debate the supplemental views that I and my Democratic colleagues wrote on this bill which lay out our concerns about this bill's shortcomings. I think they will be sufficient to explain why so many of us have such grave misgivings about this bill.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 10 seconds.

Mr. Chairman, I simply want to say that I agree with the remarks of the gentleman from Texas, and I hope the committee will listen to what he said.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 4 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, this Labor, Health and Education bill is supposed to be that portion of the budget which invests in our children, which opens the door of opportunity for young people, which opens the door to the doctor's office or to the hospital for people who live life on its underside and do not have access to regular health care. It is supposed to protect the interests of workers. This bill falls far short on all fronts.

This bill does nothing to help workers, to protect workers against the efforts of employers to chisel on overtime pay. It falls billions of dollars behind the No Child Left Behind legislation in terms of meeting our obligations to support the education of our

children. It brings to a screeching halt the healthy expansion of after-school programs. It does, in so many ways, fall short of where we ought to be; and it does that because the majority, as I said earlier, has made a decision that its top legislative priority is ever more and always to provide very large tax cuts to people who are already very well off.

I really believe that there is no way to fix this bill, because this bill is the result of two past decisions. It is the result, as the gentleman from Ohio has said, it is the result of the Republican majority's passing a budget resolution which provides inadequate room for education, health, and worker-protection programs. It is also the result of the second vote which occurred on this House floor just a few weeks ago on a resolution that I offered to try to amend that budget resolution so that it would be a somewhat more progressive product that we could be proud of.

At this point, the only way that you could help this bill is to move it on to the Senate in the hopes that the Senate will provide better numbers so that in conference we can provide more resources for education, health care, and worker-protection bills that are so crucial to the welfare of this country's population.

I would say, Mr. Chairman, that there is only one way in the long term that we can fix this problem, and that is to put a different person in the White House and a different majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Because what is really at stake in this election, in my view, as someone said on the other side of the aisle, what is really at stake is whether or not this country is going to continue to build a social safety net for the middle class, for the broad working class of this country, or whether we are going to say, in effect, ``Sorry, but everybody is going to be on their own. You are going to rely on the luck of the draw. If life treats you happily, you will come out as one of life's winners; and if life does not treat you so happily, sorry, but you are on your own. We have no obligation to help in any significant way.''

This bill does a number of things for people, but it does not do nearly enough to meet the rising challenges that we have. And I regret very much that we are in that position, but there is not much we in the minority can do to change it except to make clear what is happening. So I urge Members to remember that as we go through the bill this afternoon.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute, and I would simply say to the gentleman the issue is not whether we should have cut taxes. Obviously, any time the economy is underperforming, it is perfectly legitimate to cut taxes over the short term. FDR invented that, and I am fully subscribed to that Keynesian approach to economics.

What I do not subscribe to is the idea that in the context of cutting taxes we have to give people who make $1 million a year a $127,000 tax cut. I think we could very well limit the size of that tax cut. That is the only tax cut that we have objected to and tried to change in order to finance this bill.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 additional minute, and I would simply say in response that a very small portion of the people who would be affected by our amendment are small businessmen. Very small portion. The fact is that this House has to make a choice. Do we think it is essential to provide a $120,000 tax cut to people making over $1 million a year; or do we think that we ought to use some of that money to provide better opportunity for education, better health care for 45 million people that do not have it, and some additional protection for our workers in what is becoming every day a more and more brutal world market?

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. McCarthy).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I would simply like to say that I react to the gentleman's numbers with a touch of humor because the argument he makes is similar to the child who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. The fact is if you look at the historical record over the last 10 years, if the House Republican majority had had its way, we would have appropriated about $20 billion less for education over the last 10 years than the Congress wound up appropriating. The House Republicans had to be led kicking and screaming into supporting the increases which he now tries to claim credit for.

I would point out this is the same Republican majority which tried 10 years ago to abolish the Department of Education and tried to make savage cuts in education 3 years in a row before they finally got religion.

I would also point out that in President Bush's first year, it was the Democrats who led the effort to add $4 billion to the President's education budget, and I am happy to say we finally persuaded the Republican majority to agree with our request.

If the House Republicans had had their way, $3.4 billion less would have been spent on education of the poorest children in America than was actually appropriated, and 1 million low-income children would have been eliminated from the Title I program; $3.1 billion less would have been spent on the education of children with disabilities than was actually appropriated if the House Republican majority had its way; $524 million less would have been spent on safe and nurturing places for children in the after-school hours than was actually appropriated if the House Republican majority had its way; and the maximum Pell grant would have been smaller in 5 of the last 10 years than the level actually approved, again if the House Republican majority had its way.

So I guess I am willing to accept the fact that the Republicans now want to borrow the money that we succeeded in

putting into the education budget and borrow it so they can make on their own competing claims the education budget. I do not much care as long as we've got the money.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I urge Members to find every opportunity possible to support more resources in this bill for education, health care, and worker protection.

Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

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

Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. Chairman, we also would be happy to accept it on this side of the aisle. It is a good amendment.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, let me simply say the gentleman is absolutely right. This is a program that was begun by Secretary Shalala, who recognized that it is not enough to provide money to health centers if we do not also provide a thoughtful way to coordinate programs and services. This is what makes some of these efforts workable, and I think it is a disgrace that at a time when we have seen the number of uninsured increase from 40 to 45 million people, that we are eliminating a program that is crucial to providing service in more than 20 communities around the country.

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

Mr. Chairman, I must also reluctantly oppose the amendment, because I think it has an unintended effect. The amendment, as I read it, would actually result in a small across-the-board reduction in funding for virtually all public health agency programs, including the National Institutes of Health. I do not think that is what we want to do.

Secondly, I would point out the gentlewoman has made quite clear in her remarks that she is attempting to add funding for a specific disease. In all of the years this subcommittee has funded the National Institutes of Health, it has never dictated to the National Institutes exactly how much money they should spend on any specific disease, and I do not think we ought to start now.

So I reluctantly would have to oppose the amendment and say that what we really need is an overall increase in funding for NIH so that we can attack lupus and dozens of other diseases that are causing great pain and suffering to people around the world.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I want to say I am sure it is not the intention of the gentlewoman from Texas to fund this amendment by providing for an actual reduction in NIH, but the way she has drawn the amendment, it has that effect. I understand that is not her intention, but that is the effect of the amendment as written.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. Chairman, I want to say that I absolutely agree with the gentleman who just spoke, and I congratulate him for the comments that he made. Everyone who has looked with any care whatsoever at this issue understands that there are massive ethical considerations surrounding this question. We need to try to work our way through those ethical considerations in a way that will bring people together on some very fundamental questions, rather

than pulling them apart. I think the gentleman has pointed to one way that can be done.

I would caution those in this society who think that we can somehow stop science from engaging in the kind of research just discussed by the gentleman from California, I would caution those who feel that we can stop that kind of research. We cannot. That kind of research will go forward. The only question is whether it will go forward in the United States or whether it will be somewhere else, and whether or not it will go forward under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health with all of the ethical considerations that they try to bring to bear on this issue, or whether it will be conducted by scientific teams that are not quite so careful about the ethical considerations involved.

I think that the gentleman from California has pointed out how we could move people forward on this issue in a way which is not destructive of anyone's ethical values. We need to start recognizing that we are dealing with real situations, real human beings; and humanity is not going to allow politicians to get in the way of attacking some of the medical problems that have been discussed by the gentleman from Rhode Island or by the gentleman from California; and I congratulate both of them for raising the issue this afternoon.

Amendment Offered by Ms. Jackson-Lee of Texas

Mr. Chairman, I reserve a point of order against the amendment. We do not have a copy.

Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation, and I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. Chairman, I would simply say that I would appreciate it if Members have amendments to offer that they at least provide each side of the committee with a copy of the amendment. I think it is a disservice to the House when amendments are sprung on the committee and we have no opportunity to review them. If we are shown them ahead of time, we can help Members draft them correctly so that they are in order.

So it seems to me it is in the interests of both people who offer these amendments and it is in the interests of the House for Members who are planning to offer amendments to provide us copies. It would seem to me a simple matter of common courtesy.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I certainly have no objection to the gentleman's efforts to provide funding for the block grant program. I think we ought to do that, but I offer this amendment to illustrate that the budget resolution adopted by the majority has put this committee in a position where each time a Member of either the majority or minority party tries to save a deserving program, they are forced to gouge another deserving program in order to pay for it.

Yet at the same time, that same budget resolution made it possible for the government to provide every person in this country who makes $1 million or more a year with a $127,000 tax cut this year. What this amendment points out is that if we simply reduce that $127,000 tax cut for millionaires by $125, so they would be stuck with a whole $125 less than $127,000, if we did that, we would not have to cut into the Even Start program.

I am not the sponsor of the Even Start program. The sponsor of the Even Start program was a former Republican Member of this House who was a Republican chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, Bill Goodling. I do not think we ought to be going after that program in order to do what the gentleman wants to do. So I am offering this amendment simply to illustrate that there are other ways to deal with this problem that are much more socially just and economically sensible.

I do not see why we ought to be cutting into funding which helps families of disadvantaged children learn to read and write. I do not see why we should be cutting into that program in order to fund the other block grant program. But this is the kind of robbing-Peter-to- pay-Paul situation that we have been backed into by the majority and by the White House.

Mr. Chairman, I offer this amendment in the hopes that the majority will not strike it on a point of order, because I think this is a much more civilized way to deal with what the gentleman is trying to do.

Point of Order

Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, the gentleman seeks to strike this amendment on a point of order. I would point out that the purpose of the Budget Act is to force Congress to make choices, to choose between priorities in the process of putting together a comprehensive budget. What the majority has done by the way it has used budget resolutions and the process of reconciliation is, instead, to fragment the budget process so that the Congress never gets to deal with the trade-offs between revenues and expenditures. That, I think, is a fundamental corruption of the original intention of the Budget Act.

I wish that the majority party had not determined to walk down this road, but they have; and under the approach that they have established in the House, I must concede the point of order, but it is too bad because it means that we are going to be gouging one good Republican program in order to pay for one good national program.

Mr. Chairman, I also reserve a point of order.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from California, and I fully agree with his statement.

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

Mr. Chairman, there are now more than 8 million people out of work in this country; 3 million have been out of work for so long they have exhausted their unemployment compensation benefits. We have more than 1.5 million fewer private sector jobs than we had 4 years ago, and the administration's response to that has been to impose new regulations allowing employers to chisel workers on overtime protection, despite the fact that cost of living has risen twice as much this year as last year, despite the fact that gas prices, college tuition, and health care costs are going through the roof.

I had planned at this point to offer an amendment with the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) which would block most of the sections of that new rule with one exception: We would have allowed the changes to go forward that improve the situation for workers that make between $8,000 and $23,000 a year. But now I have been told that if I intend to offer that amendment tonight, the majority will shut down the House for the evening.

The record will show that the minority on every single appropriation bill has cooperated procedurally with the majority, even when we have not agreed with the content of those bills, in the interest of comity in the hopes that somehow we could reach compromise and accommodation as we move through the process.

In spite of that cooperation, the majority by the end of this fiscal year will only be able to show that they have passed 1 and possibly 2 of the 13 appropriation bills. I want it made clear that the reason for that miserable record is because of the rigidity of the majority and because of their refusal to work with the minority or even other members of the majority in the other body. This is part of a long pattern of procedural abuse.

On prescription drugs, the majority held the vote open for 3 hours when they did not get the result they wanted. On the PATRIOT Act, the Sanders amendment was held open for 40 minutes until enough arms could be broken on the majority side. On vouchers on the D.C. bill, the roll was held open for 50 minutes until the majority could achieve a different result. On campaign finance, the House was kept at bay for 2 hours before the majority moved ahead.

I would simply make this point, Mr. Chairman. The majority is busy trying to bring the nicer points of democracy to Iraq. It would be nice if they would recognize those same niceties here at home.

I want to make one further point. People are asking me, why are you cooperating procedurally on bringing the Labor, Health, Education bill to the floor when you are so opposed to its contents? Well, there are two reasons. First of all, because we believe on the minority side that these issues ought to be debated even if we do not win. Secondly, very frankly, I want the record to show in the end that even though the minority has given the majority every single procedural cooperation that we could, that the majority has still not been able to perform because of its own rigidity and because they refuse to work with anybody, because they refuse to compromise with anybody.

It is outrageous after we have been asked for so long to bring this bill to the floor, they now want to pull the bill so they have another chance to twist arms overnight.

Do you really want to put workers in so much of a corner that you will not even allow us to have a vote on this overtime provision? We already won this vote once in the House, we won it once in the Senate, and yet the majority leadership arbitrarily stripped it out of the bill last year. Now you are trying to play the same game this time. I hope that every majority Member who intends to vote for this amendment tomorrow, if the House comes back into session on this bill, I hope you will stick with your conscience overnight and not cave in to pressure by tomorrow morning.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.