Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, really in one sense, it does not matter how people vote on this resolution because it has no effect, but some things need to be said about it.

Every Member here supports the troops. Every Member here applauds the sacrifices the men and women of our Armed Forces have made. Every Member here understands that America needs no one's permission to defend this country from attack.

But when American leaders choose to wage a preemptive war against a country that did not attack the United States, when those leaders attempt to rally the American people to their support on the basis of faulty information and bad intelligence, when that unilateral decision costs more than 500 American lives, when it costs thousands of American wounded, when it costs the lives of uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, that decision does not, despite the claims of this resolution, it does not leave us in a stronger and safer position, as this resolution falsely suggests. In fact, it could be argued it does just the opposite.

Are we really in a safer and stronger position when the world and our allies know that we went to war unilaterally on the basis of wrong intelligence? Are we really going to be in a stronger position to persuade the world to follow us the next time we tell them it is necessary to act; for example, in the case of an American conclusion that North Korea has nuclear weapons?

Are we really in a safer and stronger position in persuading more Americans to serve in the military when they see that we rushed to war before 45,000 U.S. troops were supplied with the ceramic inserts that they needed for their body armor, when they see their government did not provide the shields that protect Humvees and their occupants from roadbed explosions, or when they see that their government did not supply our troops with the electronic jammers needed to protect those troops against remotely detonated bombs and mines?

Are we really in a safer and stronger position when we are forced to police Iraq largely on our own, with little help from our allies? Have we really created a safer world when, by our actions, we have told the Indians and Pakistanis, who have been close to nuclear war with each other, that a doctrine of preemptive war is acceptable? Are we really as safe and strong as we would be if we had not diverted to Iraq key personnel and taken intelligence resources away from the crucial task of finding Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan?

Last night, many of us sang the praises of John Hume, the great Irish peacemaker. Hume said last night that there has been no war in history that has not killed more innocent civilians than it has combatants.

Are we really safer and stronger in a world where thousands of young Muslims now are being told to hate the United States because we waged a war against a Muslim country that had not attacked the U.S., rather than focusing like a laser on destroying the al Qaeda network which is the justifiable target of our rage?

Many Members who vote for this resolution today will do so despite the misstatements it contains, because it contains an expression of support for our troops. Many who vote against it will also do so because of the unwarranted assertions in this resolution that needlessly detract from our focus on the sacrifices those troops have made.

Mr. Speaker, shame on the House leadership for drafting this resolution in a way that needlessly divides us rather than unites us. By not allowing meaningful alternatives to be debated and voted on, they do not promote democracy; they mock it.

Mr. Speaker, I am inserting in the Record after my statement a copy of the resolution on which we should have been allowed to vote.

Resolution

Relating to the liberation of the Iraqi people and the

valiant service of the United States Armed Forces and

Coalition forces.

Whereas Saddam Hussein and his regime committed crimes

against humanity, systematically violating the human rights

of Iraqis and citizens of other countries;

Whereas Saddam Hussein's terror regime subjected the Iraqi

people to murder, torture, rape, and amputation;

Whereas on March 16, 1988, Saddam Hussein's regime had and

unleashed weapons of mass destruction against Kurdish

citizens, killing nearly 5,000 of them;

Whereas as many as 270 mass grave sites, containing the

remains of as many as 400,000 victims of Saddam Hussein's

regime, have been found in Iraq;

Whereas rape was used to intimidate the Iraqi population,

with victims often raped in front of their families;

Whereas the regime punished the Marsh Arabs by draining the

marshlands, which created hundreds of thousands of refugees

and caused an ecological catastrophe;

Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-

338), passed by the House of Representatives by a vote of 360

to 38, made it United States policy to support efforts to

remove from power the regime headed by Saddam Hussein;

Whereas with the Iraqi regime failing to comply with 16

previously adopted United Nations Security Council

resolutions, the Security Council unanimously approved

Resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002, declaring that Iraq `has

been and remains in material breach of its obligations under

relevant resolutions, including resolution 687 (1991), in

particular through Iraq's failure to cooperate with United

Nations inspectors'; and

Whereas on October 10, 2002, the House of Representatives

passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against

Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243) and on March 19,

2003, the United States initiated military operations in

Iraq: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) acknowledges the belief on the part of some that the

United States and the world have been made safer with the

removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime from power in Iraq

and the belief that a final judgment on the value of

activities in Iraq cannot be made until Iraq is stable and

secure;

(2) commends the Iraqi people for their courage in the face

of unspeakable oppression and brutality inflicted on them by

Saddam Hussein's regime;

(3) commends the Iraqi people on the adoption of Iraq's

interim constitution;

(4) commends the members of the United States Armed Forces

and Coalition forces for liberating Iraq and expresses its

gratitude for their valiant service; and

(5) urges the President--

(A) to take all steps necessary to ensure that all members

of the United States Armed Forces serving in Iraq receive the

best force protection equipment available, including

protective body armor and extra-armored wheeled vehicles

capable of providing better protection against explosive

devices;

(B) to ensure that all members of the Armed Forces who

suffer wounds or other injuries, or who incur illness, while

serving in Iraq receive complete, timely, and high-quality

health care to treat the short-term and long-term

consequences of such wounds, injuries, and illnesses;

(C) to recognize the key contributions made by members of

the reserve components of the Armed Forces, and their

families, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and, in consultation

with Congress, to address immediately the disparity that

exists for many Reserve and Guard personnel between the pay

they receive in civilian life and the military compensation

they receive when ordered to active duty;

(D) to acknowledge that there were serious deficiencies in

United States pre-war intelligence on Iraq, particularly in

light of the failure to find any evidence of significant

weapons of mass destruction programs, and to take steps now

to improve intelligence so that United States troops are

better protected and future United States national security

strategies are better informed;

(E) to request sufficient funding immediately to fully

support United States military operations in Iraq and the

surrounding region in order to ensure the safety and well-

being of United States troops deployed to Iraq and the

surrounding region;

(F) to obtain far-reaching international participation in

the securing, reconstruction, and political development of

Iraq so that the United States can reduce the number of its

troops in Iraq, and reduce the size of its financial

commitment to Iraq operations; and

(G) to take steps to correct the failure of the United

States Government to plan adequately for the post-war

occupation of Iraq, including the failure to integrate

internal United States Government studies and outside expert

opinions that predicted the onset of guerrilla activity and

described how to promote effective reconstruction,

democratization, and civil society development activities,

and the failure to apply those studies and opinions today in

order to improve current United States reconstruction efforts

in Iraq;

(6) expresses deep sorrow and regret for the deaths of more

than 550 and the wounding of more than 3,500 members of the

United States Armed Forces in Iraq and extends support to

their families; and

(7) expresses sorrow and regret for the deaths in Iraq of

United States civilians, Untied Nations personnel, unknown

numbers of Iraqi civilians, and other noncombatants.

Mr. Chairman, this bill certainly is fine, as far as it goes, but the fact is that higher fines are going to do nothing to mitigate the real problem, which is the concentration of power in the hands of a limited number of large corporations that believe they are outside the reach of the communities they serve.

Communities determine standards of decency, and the most effective enforcement of those standards is through local ownership of television and radio stations. FCC fines, even in the millions, will not stop national broadcasters from lowering standards.

Infinity stations, for instance, were fined $1.7 million to settle a series of indecency cases, but that did not stop them. On the contrary, just last year, they were fined for a radio contest for couples willing to perform sexually in public places in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities with a different radio announcer following each couple and providing the play-by-play accounting of the activities.

The House tried to do something about the core problem when it adopted, in a bipartisan manner, the Commerce, State, Justice appropriations bill, which had a provision to prevent the FCC from relaxing the established limits on network-owned television stations, and the Senate did the same thing. But at the last moment, in the dead of night, the White House convinced Republican congressional leaders to cave in to the special interest media conglomerates and they agreed to weaken the provision.

So by all means, pass this bill, if you want. It will perhaps have a minor effect. But if you really want to do something to give communities the ability to stop this nonsense, you will take away from the FCC the ability to concentrate broadcasting power in the hands of a few corporations. That is what makes the system so fundamentally arrogant. That is what puts the system so far out of the reach of average citizens, who resent seeing this garbage.

Until the Congress acts on that, it will be simply dealing with window dressing.

Mr. Speaker, anyone interested in why there has been such chaos in post-war Iraq needs to read the article I am inserting in the Record by James Fallows which appeared in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

[From the Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2004]

Blind Into Baghdad

(By James Fallows)

On a Friday afternoon last November, I met Douglas Feith in

his office at the Pentagon to discuss what has happened in

Iraq. Feith's title is undersecretary of defense for policy,

which places him, along with several other undersecretaries,

just below Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy

Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon's hierarchy.

Informally he is seen in Washington as ``Wolfowitz's

Wolfowitz''--that is, as a deputy who has a wide range of

responsibilities but is clearly identified with one

particular policy. That policy is bringing regime change to

Iraq--a goal that both Wolfowitz and Feith strongly advocated

through the 1990s. To opponents of the war in Iraq, Feith is

one of several shadowy, Rasputinlike figures who are shaping

U.S. policy. He is seen much the way enemies of the Clinton

Administration saw Hillary Clinton. Others associated with

the Bush Administration who are seen this way include the

consultant Richard Perle; Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, the chief

of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney; and the Vice

President himself. What these officials have in common is

their presumably great private influence and--even in the

case of the Vice President--their limited public visibility

and accountability.

In person Douglas Feith is nothing like Rasputin. Between a

Reagan-era stint in the Pentagon and his current job he was a

Washington lawyer for fifteen years, and he answered my

questions with a lawyer's affability in the face of presumed

disagreement. I could be biased in Feith's favor, because he

was the most senior Administration official who granted my

request for an interview about postwar Iraq. Like Donald

Rumsfeld, Feith acts and sounds younger than many others of

his age (fifty). But distinctly unlike Rumsfeld at a press

conference, Feith in this interview did not seem at all

arrogant or testy. His replies were relatively candid and

unforced, in contrast to the angry or relentlessly on-message

responses that have become standard from senior

Administration officials. He acknowledged what was ``becoming

the conventional wisdom'' about the Administration's failure

to plan adequately for events after the fall of Baghdad, and

then explained--with animation, dramatic pauses, and

gestures--why he thought it was wrong.

Feith offered a number of specific illustrations of what he

considered underappreciated successes. Some were familiar--

the oil wells weren't on fire, Iraqis didn't starve or flee--

but others were less so. For instance, he described the

Administration's careful effort to replace old Iraqi dinars,

which carried Saddam Hussein's image (``It's interesting how

important that is, and it ties into the whole issue of

whether people think that Saddam might be coming back''),

with a new form of currency, without causing a run on the

currency.

But mainly he challenged the premise of most critics: that

the Administration could have done a better job of preparing

for the consequences of victory. When I asked what had

gone better than expected, and what had gone worse, he

said, ``We don't exactly deal in `expectations.'

Expectations are too close to `predictions.' We're not

comfortable with predictions. It is one of the big

strategic premises of the work that we do.''

The limits of future knowledge, Feith said, were of special

importance to Rumsfeld, ``who is death to predictions.''

``His big strategic theme is uncertainty,'' Feith said. ``The

need to deal strategically with uncertainty. The inability to

predict the future. The limits on our knowledge and the

limits on our intelligence.''

In practice, Feith said, this meant being ready for

whatever proved to be the situation in postwar Iraq. ``You

will not find a single piece of paper . . . . If anybody ever

went through all of our records--and someday some people

will, presumably--nobody will find a single piece of paper

that says, `Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you

what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we

need plans for.' If you tried that, you would get thrown out

of Rumsfeld's office so fast--if you ever went in there and

said,`Let me tell you what something's going to look like in

the future,' you wouldn't get to your next sentence!''

``This is an important point,'' he said, ``because of this

issue of What did we believe? . . . . The common line is,

nobody planned for security because Ahmed Chalabi told us

that everything was going to be swell.'' Chalabi, the exiled

leader of the Iraqi National Congress, has often been blamed

for making rosy predictions about the ease of governing

postwar Iraq. ``So we predicted that everything was going to

be swell, and we didn't plan for things not being swell.''

Here Feith paused for a few seconds, raised his hands with

both palms up, and put on a ``Can you believe it?''

expression. ``I mean--one would really have to be a

simpleton. And whatever people think of me, how can anybody

think that Don Rumsfeld is that dumb? He's so evidently not

that dumb, that how can people write things like that?'' He

sounded amazed rather than angry.

No one contends that Donald Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz, or

Douglas Feith, or the Administration as a whole is dumb. The

wisdom of their preparations for the aftermath of military

victory in Iraq is the question. Feith's argument was a less

defensive-sounding version of the Administration's general

response to criticisms of its postwar policy: Life is

uncertain, especially when the lid

comes off a long-tyrannized society. American planners did

about as well as anyone could in preparing for the

unforeseeable. Anyone who says otherwise is indulging in

lazy, unfair second-guessing. ``The notion that there was a

memo that was once written, that if we had only listened to

that memo, all would be well in Iraq, is so preposterous,''

Feith told me.

The notion of a single memo's changing history is indeed

farfetched. The idea that a substantial body of knowledge

could have improved postwar prospects is not. The

Administration could not have known everything about what it

would find in Iraq. But it could have--and should have--done

far more than it did.

Almost everything, good and bad, that has happened in Iraq

since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime was the subject of

extensive pre-war discussion and analysis. This is

particularly true of what have proved to be the harshest

realities for the United States since the fall of Baghdad:

that occupying the country is much more difficult than

conquering it; that a breakdown in public order can

jeopardize every other goal; that the ambition of patiently

nurturing a new democracy is at odds with the desire to turn

control over to the Iraqis quickly and get U.S. troops out;

that the Sunni center of the country is the main security

problem; that with each passing day Americans risk being seen

less as liberators and more as occupiers, and targets.

All this, and much more, was laid out in detail and in

writing long before the U.S. government made the final

decision to attack. Even now the collective efforts at

planning by the CIA, the State Department, the Army and the

Marine Corps, the United States Agency for International

Development, and a wide variety of other groups inside and

outside the government are underappreciated by the public.

The one pre-war effort that has received substantial recent

attention, the State Department's Future of Iraq project,

produced thousands of pages of findings, barely one paragraph

of which has until now been quoted in the press. The

Administration will be admired in retrospect for how much

knowledge it created about the challenge it was taking on.

U.S. government predictions about postwar Iraq's problems

have proved as accurate as the assessments of pre-war Iraq's

strategic threat have proved flawed.

But the Administration will be condemned for what it did

with what was known. The problems the United States has

encountered are precisely the ones its own expert agencies

warned against. Exactly what went wrong with the occupation

will be studied for years--or should be. The missteps of the

first half year in Iraq are as significant as other classic

and carefully examined failures in foreign policy, including

John Kennedy's handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961,

and Lyndon Johnson's decision to escalate U.S. involvement in

Vietnam, in 1965. The United States withstood those previous

failures, and it will withstand this one. Having taken over

Iraq and captured Saddam Hussein, it has no moral or

practical choice other than to see out the occupation and to

help rebuild and democratize the country. But its missteps

have come at a heavy cost. And the ongoing financial,

diplomatic, and human cost of the Iraq occupation is the more

grievous in light of advance warnings the government had.

before september 11, 2001: the early days

Concern about Saddam Hussein pre-dated the 9/11 attacks and

even the inauguration of George W. Bush. In 1998 Congress

passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation

Act, which declared that ``it should be the policy of the

United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed

by Saddam Hussein from power.'' During the 2000 presidential

campaign Al Gore promised to support groups working to unseat

Saddam Hussein. In the week before Bush took office, Nicholas

Lemann reported in The New Yorker that ``the idea of

overthrowing Saddam is not an idle fantasy--or, if it is,

it's one that has lately occupied the minds of many American

officials, including people close to George W. Bush.'' But

the intellectual case for regime change, argued during the

Clinton years by some Democrats and notably by Paul

Wolfowitz, then the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of

Advanced International Studies, shifted clearly toward

operational planning after the destruction of the World Trade

Center.

For much of the public this case for war against Iraq

rested on an assumed connection (though this was never

demonstrated, and was officially disavowed by the President)

between Saddam Hussein's regime and the terrorist hijackers.

Within the government the case was equally compelling but

different. September 11 had shown that the United States was

newly vulnerable; to protect itself it had to fight

terrorists at their source; and because Saddam Hussein's

regime was the leading potential source of future ``state-

sponsored'' terrorism, it had become an active threat,

whether or not it played any role in 9/11. The very next day,

September 12, 2001, James Woolsey, who had been Clinton's

first CIA director, told me that no matter who proved to be

responsible for this attack, the solution had to include

removing Saddam Hussein, because he was so likely to be

involved next time. A military planner inside the Pentagon

later told me that on September 13 his group was asked to

draw up scenarios for an assault on Iraq, not just

Afghanistan.

Soon after becoming the Army Chief of Staff, in 1999,

General Eric Shinseki had begun ordering war-game exercises

to judge strategies and manpower needs for possible combat in

Iraq. This was not because he assumed a war was imminent. He

thought that the greater Caspian Sea region, including Iraq,

would present a uniquely difficult challenge for U.S. troops,

because of its geography and political tensions. After 9/11,

Army war games involving Iraq began in earnest.

In his first State of the Union address, on January 29,

2002, President Bush said that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea

were an ``axis of evil'' that threatened world peace. ``By

seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a

grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to

terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They

could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United

States.''

By the time of this speech efforts were afoot not simply to

remove Saddam Hussein but also to imagine what Iraq would be

like when he was gone. In late October of 2001, while the

U.S. military was conducting its rout of the Taliban from

Afghanistan, the State Department had quietly begun its

planning for the aftermath of a ``transition'' in Iraq. At

about the time of the ``axis of evil'' speech, working groups

within the department were putting together a list of postwar

jobs and topics to be considered, and possible groups of

experts to work on them.

one year before the war: the ``future of iraq''

Thus was born the Future of Iraq project, whose existence

is by now well known, but whose findings and potential impact

have rarely been reported and examined. The State Department

first publicly mentioned the project in March of 2002, when

it quietly announced the lineup of the working groups. At the

time, media attention was overwhelmingly directed toward

Afghanistan, where Operation Anaconda, the half-successful

effort to kill or capture al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, was

under way.

For several months before announcing the project the State

Department had been attempting to coordinate the efforts of

the many fractious Iraqi exile organizations. The Future of

Iraq project held the potential for harnessing, and perhaps

even harmonizing, the expertise available from the exile

groups.

It was also in keeping with a surprisingly well established

U.S. government tradition of preparing for postwar duties

before there was a clear idea of when fighting would begin,

let alone when it would end. Before the United States entered

World War II, teams at the Army War College were studying

what went right and wrong when American doughboys occupied

Germany after World War I. Within months of the attack on

Pearl Harbor, a School of Military Government had been

created, at the University of Virginia, to plan for the

occupation of both Germany and Japan. In 1995, while U.S.

negotiators, led by Richard Holbrooke, were still working at

the Dayton peace talks to end the war in the Balkans, World

Bank representatives were on hand to arrange loans for the

new regimes.

Contemplating postwar plans posed a problem for those who,

like many in the State Department, were skeptical of the need

for war. Were they making a war more likely if they prepared

for its aftermath? Thomas Warrick, the State Department

official who directed the Future of Iraq project, was

considered to be in the antiwar camp. But according to

associates, he explained the importance of preparing for war

by saying, ``I'm nervous that they're actually going to do

it--and the day after they'll turn to us and ask, `Now what?'

'' So he pushed ahead with the project, setting up numerous

conferences and drafting sessions that would bring together

teams of exiles--among them Kanan Makiya, the author of the

influential anti-Saddam book, Republic of Fear, first

published in 1989. A small number of ``international

advisers,'' mainly from the United States, were also assigned

to the teams. Eventually there would be seventeen working

groups, designed systematically to cover what would be

needed to rebuild the political and economic

infrastructure of the country. ``Democratic Principles and

Procedures'' was the name of one of the groups, which was

assigned to suggest the legal framework for a new

government; Makiya would write much of its report. The

``Transitional Justice'' group was supposed to work on

reparations, amnesty, and de-Baathification laws. Groups

studying economic matters included ``Public Finance,''

``Oil and Energy,'' and ``Water, Agriculture and

Environment.''

In May of 2002 Congress authorized $5 million to fund the

project's studies. In the flurry of news from Afghanistan the

project went unnoticed in the press until June, when the

State Department announced that the first meetings would take

place in July. ``The role of the U.S. government and State

Department is to see what the Iraqis and Iraqi-Americans

want,'' Warrick said at a conference on June 1, 2002. ``The

impetus for change comes from [Iraqis], not us. This is the

job of Iraqis inside and outside.''

That same day President Bush delivered a graduation speech

at West Point, giving a first look at the doctrine of pre-

emptive war. He told the cadets, to cheers, ``Our security

will require all Americans to be forward-looking and

resolute, to be ready for pre-emptive action when necessary

to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.'' Later in the

summer the doctrine was elaborated in a new

National Security Strategy, which explained that since

``rogue states'' could not be contained or deterred, they

needed to be destroyed before they could attack.

Whenever National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was

interviewed that summer, she talked mainly about the thinking

behind the new policy. When Vice President Dick Cheney was

interviewed, he talked mainly about Saddam Hussein's defiance

of international law. But when Secretary of State Colin

Powell was interviewed, he constantly stressed the value of

an international approach to the problem and the need to give

UN arms inspectors adequate time to do their job.

War with Iraq was not inevitable at this point, but it

seemed more and more likely. Daily conversation in

Washington, which usually reverts to ``So, who do you think

will be the next President?,'' switched instead to ``So, when

do you think we're going to war?''

It was in these circumstances that the Future of Iraq

project's working groups deliberated. Most of the meetings

were in Washington. Some were in London, and one session, in

early September, took place in Surrey, where representatives

of a dozen mutually suspicious exile groups discussed

prospects for democratic coexistence when Saddam Hussein was

gone. (Along with Chalabi's INC the meeting included several

rival Kurdish groups, Assyrian and Turkomen organizations,

the Iraqi Constitutional Monarchy Movement, and others.)

The project did not overcome all the tensions among its

members, and the results of its deliberations were uneven.

Three of its intended working groups never actually met--

including, ominously, ``Preserving Iraq's Cultural

Heritage.'' The ``Education'' group finally produced a report

only six pages long, in contrast to many hundreds of pages

from most others. Some recommendations were quirky or

reflected the tastes of the individual participants who

drafted them. A report titled ``Free Media'' proposed that

all Iraqi journalists be taken out of the country for a

month-long re-education process: ``Those who `get it' go back

as reporters; others would be retired or reassigned.'' A

group that was considering ways of informing Iraq about the

realities of democracy mentioned Baywatch and Leave It to

Beaver as information sources that had given Iraqis an

imprecise understanding of American society. It recommended

that a new film, Colonial America: Life in a Theocracy, be

shot, noting, ``The Puritan experiments provide amazing

parallels with current Moslem fundamentalism. The ultimate

failures of these US experiments can also be vividly

illustrated--witch trials, intolerance, etc.''

But whatever may have been unrealistic or factional about

these efforts, even more of what the project created was

impressive. The final report consisted of thirteen volumes of

recommendations on specific topics, plus a one-volume summary

and overview. These I have read--and I read them several

months into the occupation, when it was unfairly easy to

judge how well the forecast was standing up. (Several hundred

of the 2,500 pages were in Arabic, which sped up the reading

process.) The report was labeled ``For Official Use Only''--

an administrative term that implies confidentiality but has

no legal significance. The State Department held the report

closely until, last fall, it agreed to congressional requests

to turn over the findings.

Most of the project's judgments look good in retrospect--

and virtually all reveal a touching earnestness about working

out the details of reconstructing a society. For instance,

one of the thickest volumes considered the corruption endemic

in Iraqi life and laid out strategies for coping with it.

(These included a new ``Iraqi Government Code of Ethics,''

which began, ``Honesty, integrity, and fairness are the

fundamental values for the people of Iraq.'') The overview

volume, which appears to have been composed as a series of

PowerPoint charts, said that the United States was

undertaking this effort because, among other things,

``detailed public planning'' conveys U.S. government

``seriousness'' and the message that the U.S. government

``wants to learn from past regime change experiences.''

For their part, the Iraqi participants emphasized several

points that ran through all the working groups' reports. A

recurring theme was the urgency of restoring electricity and

water supplies as soon as possible after regime change. The

first item in the list of recommendations from the ``Water,

Agriculture and Environment'' group read, ``Fundamental

importance of clean water supplies for Iraqis immediately

after transition. Key to coalition/community relations.'' One

of the groups making economic recommendations wrote,

``Stressed importance of getting electrical grid up and

running immediately--key to water systems, jobs. Could go a

long way to determining Iraqis' attitudes toward Coalition

forces.''

A second theme was the need to plan carefully for the

handling and demobilization of Iraq's very sizable military.

On the one hand, a functioning army would be necessary for

public order and, once coalition forces withdrew, for the

country's defense. (``Our vision of the future is to build a

democratic civil society. In order to make this vision a

reality, we need to have an army that can work alongside this

new society.'') On the other hand, a large number of Saddam's

henchmen would have to be removed. The trick would be to get

rid of the leaders without needlessly alienating the ordinary

troops--or leaving them without income. One group wrote,

``All combatants who are included in the demobilization

process must be assured by their leaders and the new

government of their legal rights and that new prospects for

work and education will be provided by the new system.''

Toward this end it laid out a series of steps the occupation

authorities should take in the ``disarmament, demobilization,

and reintegration'' process. Another group, in a paper on

democratic principles, warned, ``The decommissioning of

hundreds of thousands of trained military personnel that [a

rapid purge] implies could create social problems.''

Next the working groups emphasized how disorderly Iraq

would be soon after liberation, and how difficult it would be

to get the country on the path to democracy--though that was

where it had to go. ``The removal of Saddam's regime will

provide a power vacuum and create popular anxieties about the

viability of all Iraqi institutions,'' a paper on rebuilding

civil society said. ``The traumatic and disruptive events

attendant to the regime change will affect all Iraqis, both

Saddam's conspirators and the general populace.'' Another

report warned more explicitly that ``the period

immediately after regime change might offer these

criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing,

plunder and looting.'' In the short term the occupying

forces would have to prevent disorder. In the long term,

according to a report written by Kanan Makiya, they would

need to recognize that ``the extent of the Iraqi

totalitarian state, its absolute power and control

exercised from Baghdad, not to mention the terror used to

enforce compliance, cannot be overestimated in their

impact on the Iraqi psyche and the attendant feeling of

fear, weakness, and shame.'' Makiya continued, ``These

conditions and circumstances do not provide a strong

foundation on which to build new institutions and a modern

nation state.''

Each of the preceding themes would seem to imply a long,

difficult U.S. commitment in Iraq. America should view its

involvement in Iraq, the summary report said, not as it had

Afghanistan, which was left to stew in lightly supervised

warlordism, but as it had Germany and Japan, which were

rebuilt over many years. But nearly every working group

stressed one other point: the military occupation itself had

to be brief. ``Note: Military government idea did not go down

well,'' one chart in the summary volume said. The ``Oil and

Energy'' group presented a ``key concept'': ``Iraqis do not

work for American contractors; Americans are seen assisting

Iraqis.''

Americans are often irritated by the illogic of ``resentful

dependence'' by weaker states. South Koreans, for example,

complain bitterly about U.S. soldiers in their country but

would complain all the more bitterly if the soldiers were

removed. The authors of the Future of Iraq report could by

those standards also be accused of illogical thinking, in

wanting U.S. support but not wanting U.S. control. Moreover,

many of the project's members had a bias that prefigured an

important source of postwar tension: they were exiles who

considered themselves the likeliest beneficiaries if the

United States transferred power to Iraqis quickly--even

though, precisely because of their exile, they had no obvious

base of support within Iraq.

To skip ahead in the story: As chaos increased in Baghdad

last summer, the chief U.S. administrator, L. Paul ``Jerry''

Bremer, wrestled constantly with a variant of this exile

paradox. The Iraqi Governing Council, whose twenty-five

members were chosen by Americans, was supposed to do only the

preparatory work for an elected Iraqi government. But the

greater the pressure on Bremer for ``Iraqification,'' the

more tempted he was to give in to the council's demand that

he simply put it in charge without waiting for an election.

More than a year earlier, long before combat began, the

explicit recommendations and implicit lessons of the Future

of Iraq project had given the U.S. government a very good

idea of what political conflicts it could expect in Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, I am inserting in the Record today an article which appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday, February 8, 2004. The article is about the price that is paid by Chinese workers for Wal- Mart's low prices. But, in fact, the article has far broader implications for American workers.

The article makes clear that low prices offered by Wal-Mart are built on a foundation of injustice for Chinese workers. But more importantly, for American workers the article demonstrates how the race to the bottom for workers wages and benefits occurs in this country. By implication, it illustrates that if today Wal-Mart and companies like it produce lower wages by squeezing their own workers wages and benefits, that creates pressure on competitors to do the same thing.

Every Member of Congress and every American ought to ask whether America really wants to follow the Wal-Mart economic model.

[From the Washington Post Foreign Service, Feb. 8, 2004]

Chinese Workers Pay for Wal-Mart's Low Prices

(By Peter S. Goodman and Philip P. Pan)

Shenzhen, China.--Inside the factory, amid clattering

machinery and clouds of sawdust, men without earplugs or

protective goggles feed wood into screaming electric saws,

making cabinets for stereo speakers. Women hunch over

worktables, many hands bandaged and few covered by gloves,

pressing transistors into circuit boards.

Most of the 2,100 workers here are poor migrants from the

countryside who have come to this industrial hub in southern

China for jobs that pay about $120 a month. A sign on the

wall reminds them of their expendability in a nation with

hundreds of millions of surplus workers: ``If you don't work

hard today, tomorrow you'll have to try hard to look for a

job.''

The calculations driving production here at Shenzhen Baoan

Fenda Industrial Co. are no different from those governing

global capitalism in general--make more for less--but it is

applied with particular vigor on this shop floor. Sixty

percent of the stereos coming off the line are for one

customer: Wal-Mart Stores Inc., whose mastery at squeezing

savings from its supply chain made it the world's largest

company.

``The profit is really small,'' said Surely Huang, a

factory engineer, speaking of the 350,000 stereos that Fenda

agreed in March to supply to the retailer for $30 to $40

each. Huang said they sell for $50 in the United States. ``We

have to constantly cut costs to satisfy Wal-Mart.''

Yet this factory and thousands of others along China's east

coast have decided, with China's leaders, that the deal is

worth the price. Wal-Mart provides access to vastly more

store shelves than they could ever reach by themselves, a way

to build a brand from Fort Worth to Frankfurt. Meeting Wal-

Mart's strict requirements could improve the factory's

efficiency and make it easier to land contracts from other

major retailers.

As capital scours the globe for cheaper and more malleable

workers, and as poor countries seek multinational companies

to provide jobs, lift production and open export markets,

Wal-Mart and China have forged themselves into the ultimate

joint venture, their symbiosis influencing the terms of labor

and consumption the world over.

With sales of more than $245 billion a year, Wal-Mart is

the largest retailer in the United States, still the ultimate

consumer market. China is the most populous country, with 1.3

billion people, most still poor enough to willingly move

hundreds of miles from home for jobs that would be shunned by

anyone with better prospects. The Communist Party government

has become perhaps the world's greatest facilitator of

capitalist production, beckoning multinational giants with

tax-free zones and harsh punishment for anyone with designs

on organizing a labor movement.

More than 80 percent of the 6,000 factories in Wal-Mart's

worldwide database of suppliers are in China. Wal-Mart

estimates it spent $15 billion on Chinese-made products last

year, accounting for nearly one-eighth of all Chinese exports

to the United States. If the company that Sam Walton built

with his ``Made in America'' ad campaign were itself a

separate nation, it would rank as China's fifth-largest

export market, ahead of Germany and Britain.

Back in its home market, Wal-Mart's vast appetite for

Chinese imports has placed it at the center of a sharp debate

over whether the influx of low-cost products from China is

good for Americans.

Domestic manufacturers, labor groups and some politicians

point to China's record trade surplus with the United States,

estimated to have totaled $120 billion last year, and accuse

Beijing of manipulating its currency, condoning the

exploitation of its workers and competing unfairly, resulting

in the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

But Chinese officials counter that nearly two-thirds of the

country's exports are shipped from factories wholly or

jointly owned by foreign investors, with Wal-Mart often cited

as the prime example, supplying Americans with a steady flow

of low-cost, high-quality goods.

With its near-religious devotion to the pursuit of

``everyday low prices,'' Wal-Mart illustrates why U.S.-based

multinationals with operations here have not joined in the

chorus for protectionism.

``For the benefit of the consumer, we should buy

merchandise where we get the best value,'' said Andrew Tsuei,

managing director of Wal-Mart's global procurement center in

Shenzhen.

Joe Hatfield, president of Wal-Mart's Asia operations,

noted that many of the goods his company buys in China--toys,

furniture, textiles and holiday ornaments--have mostly not

been made in the United States for years. The Bush

administration has pressed China to increase the value of its

currency, which some argue makes China's goods unfairly cheap

on world markets. Hatfield rolled his eyes.

``That would be a travesty to do to the consumer in the

United States,'' he said. ``You do that and the cost of

living is going to go up.''

For Wal-Mart and other multinational companies doing

business in China, a stable currency, political peace and a

compliant workforce are nearly as important as low costs.

``There might be places in other parts of the world where

you can buy cheaper, but can you get [the product] on the

ship?'' Tsuei said. ``If we have to look at a country that's

not politically stable, you might not get your order on time.

If you deal in a country where the currency fluctuates,

everyday there is a lot of risk. China happens to have the

right mix.''

Labor activists in China and abroad say that mix includes

the ruling party's ban on independent trade unions--workers

may join only the party-run union--as well as courts and

regulatory agencies controlled by local party officials who

are often willing to overlook labor violations to appease

businesses that can be milked for taxes, fees and bribes.

The activists argue that as Wal-Mart pits suppliers against

one another and squeezes them for the lowest price, the

workers suffer.

``Wal-Mart pressures the factory to cut its price, and the

factory responds with longer hours or lower pay,'' said a

Chinese labor official, who declined to be named for fear of

punishment. ``And the workers have no options.''

In the city of Dongguan in southern Guangdong province,

where Wal-Mart suppliers are concentrated, a 27-year-old

worker who gave her name as Miss Qin complained that she can

rarely afford meat with her $75-per-month wages at Kaida Toy

Co. ``Every day we eat vegetables, mostly we eat

vegetables,'' she said, leaning over a plate of fried carrots

in a dingy restaurant.

Qin helps make plastic toy trains for Wal-Mart, but says

she cannot afford to buy toys for her 9-year-old son. ``In

four years, they haven't increased the salary,'' she said.

Kong Xianghong, the No. 2 official for the party-run union

in Guangdong province, acknowledged that low wages, long

hours and poor conditions are common in factories that supply

Wal-Mart and other U.S.-based corporations. ``It's better

than nothing,'' he said. ``Labor protections, working

conditions and wages are related to a country's level of

economic development. Of course, we want better labor

protections, but we can't afford it. We need the jobs. We

need to guarantee people can eat.''

Still, Kong said, the party-controlled union has been

frustrated that Wal-Mart has refused for three years to allow

it to set up branches in the 31 Wal-Mart stores in China--

even though he has assured the company that the union

wouldn't help workers struggle for better pay. Wal-Mart has

also fought efforts to unionize its U.S. stores.

Wal-Mart's China headquarters is a monument to its

frugality--a low building covered in white tile. The linoleum

conference table is pockmarked with gaps where the plywood

shows through. Tea is served in plastic cups. In Hatfield's

office, where he presides over Wal-Mart's Asia operations,

the rusty window frame is open, the sound of car horns

washing in from the street.

Wal-Mart portrays itself as a force for good in China. The

company says it enforces labor standards for its suppliers

and insists that they comply with Chinese law.

``We look at safety. We look at health, and this comes with

a cost. We ensure people get paid above minimum wage. They

have to have fire extinguishers, fire exits,'' Tsuei said.

``There are people out there who cannot have those things and

offer a lower price. We do not do business with those

people.''

Wal-Mart employs 100 auditors who annually inspect every

supplier's factory. Last year, the company suspended deals

with about 400 suppliers, primarily for exceeding limits on

overtime, Tsuei said. Another 72 factories were blacklisted

permanently last year, he said, almost all for employing

children under China's legal working age of 16.

But Wal-Mart does not conduct regular inspections of

smaller factories that sell goods to the company through

middlemen. Nor does it inspect all its suppliers'

subcontractors or the Chinese manufacturing operations of

U.S. suppliers such as Mattel Inc. and Dell Inc.

``The inspection system is not effective,'' said Li Qiang,

a labor organizer who has been in contact with workers at

more than a dozen factories that supply Wal-Mart, and who

worked in one himself before leaving China three years ago.

``The factories are usually notified in advance, and they

often prepare by cleaning up, creating fake time sheets and

briefing workers on what to say.''

Li said these factories often require employees to work as

many as 80 hours per week during the busy season for $75 to

$110 per month, violating Chinese labor laws. If Wal-Mart

really wanted to monitor conditions among its suppliers, Li

said, it could do so with surprise visits, longer inspections

and independent auditors. ``But if they did that, prices

would definitely go up,'' he said.

Wal-Mart is such a big player in China that it does not

have to go looking for suppliers; the suppliers come to them,

jamming a reception area at the procurement center.

Yu Xiaoma of Guangzhou Kangaroo Leathers Co., which makes

handbags and wallets for Wal-Mart and other multinationals,

said: ``You can't make much money from Wal-Mart. They demand

the lowest, lowest price.''

Amy Gu, vice manager for exports for Goodbaby Corp., which

makes baby strollers near Shanghai, said the company

sometimes takes orders to supply Wal-Mart at or below cost

through a partnership with a Canadian distributor, Dorel

Industries Inc. ``Dorel will tell us, 'Well, Wal-Mart has

given us this price, we need a factory cost of this much,' ``

Gu said. ``And we have to find a way to deliver it.''

Wal-Mart says such arrangements benefit both sides.

Hatfield said the company has made distribution more

efficient and fair by cutting out middlemen and resisting

corruption. In a country where transportation remains

unreliable, WalMart's distribution network has given

manufacturers access to customers around the country and the

world.

He touted the case of a Guangdong factory that began

supplying Wal-Mart stores in Shenzhen with a drink made of

milk and egg yolk, delivering 25,000 units the first month.

It proved popular. By September, Wal-Mart was shipping 1

million units a month across southern China.

``They can just drop it at our distribution center and we

take care of the rest,'' Hatfield said. ``Now it's a national

brand.''

Yet those who run the factory that produces the drink,

Weijiasi Food & Beverage Co., say they haven't yet shared in

the success.

``In the beginning, we made money,'' said a manager reached

by telephone, who gave his name as Mr. Li.

``But when Wal-Mart started to launch nationwide

distribution, they pressured us for a special price at below

our cost. Now, we're losing money on every box, while Wal-

Mart is making more money.''

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\3/4\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 12 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is a pitiful Christmas tree with such a bad smell that it smells more like a garbage

truck than something appropriate to Christmas. It spectacularly insults the judgment of both the House and the Senate on a number of items.

Both Houses of the Congress voted to provide overtime protections for workers because the administration is trying to take those protections away from 8 million workers.

This bill, without one minute of comment in the conference committee, arbitrarily at the instruction of the Republican leadership rips out those protections.

Both Houses voted on a bipartisan basis to cap the number of television stations that could be owned by media conglomerates around the country. In the Senate, that amendment was offered by a Republican, Senator Stevens, and in the House it was offered by me. The House and Senate adopted both of them. Despite that fact, again, without a moment's discussion in the conference committee, at the instruction of the leadership, this conference committee has ripped out the judgment of both Houses on that score; and they have come back with a nice cozy insider arrangement that protects all of the major media giants from having to do anything inconvenient. So much for pluralism and democracy.

This House voted to instruct the conferees to allow for drug reimportation. This conference committee has stripped that out. This House earlier reached a compromise in the DOD bill and in Interior on outsourcing. This conference again arbitrarily changes that bipartisan agreement.

Fifthly, there are incredible numbers of American workers who have been unemployed for an extended period of time, and yet this Congress refuses to, in this same omnibus bill, extend long-term coverage for the unemployed. This Congress ought to be ashamed of itself on that score.

This bill gratuitously amends and guts a key provision of the Clean Air Act.

And then on funding levels, this bill on education falls $7 billion below the amount promised under the No Child Left Behind Act. It falls $350 million below the Republican-passed House budget resolution in the funding level it provides for title I, which is the main education program that helps disadvantaged children to try to improve their academic performance. And it falls $1 billion below the amount that was promised in the House budget resolution for helping to educate handicapped children.

In the National Institutes of Health, the committee pretends that it is above the bill that left the House; but by the time you take into account the across-the-board cut that is required in the bill and other financial transactions, this bill is in reality $118 million below the President for the National Institutes of Health, $145 million below the House-passed bill, and $182 million below the Senate-passed bill. It on substance short-sheets and shortchanges some of the most basic obligations of government. Yet this conference finds room for over 7,000 individual Member pieces of pork which cost the taxpayers over $7.5 billion.

In 1995, the last year that I chaired the Committee on Appropriations, the House provided virtually no earmarks in the Labor- Health-Education bill. There are well over 1,200 of those special earmarks this year.

In the VA-HUD bill, we have a $1.1 billion plug for projects. $1.1 billion is being spent for earmarked projects. One-quarter of the amount that is reserved for the House goes to three Members, one from New York, one from West Virginia, one from Alaska. If you take a look at the way these projects are distributed, if we distributed the earmarks evenly with every Member getting an equal amount in the Labor- Health-Education bill, for instance, there would be about $2 million per constituent provided for each Member's district. But it is not provided equally.

So if you are from Indiana, if we simply went by basic formulas, Indiana would get about $18 million in special earmarks, but it does not. In this bill, Indiana taxpayers get about 62 cents per capita by way of special earmarks. If you represent Oregon, you bring home to your constituents in this bill about 64 cents per capita in earmarks. North Carolina, you bring home about 85 cents per capita in earmarks. California, about a dollar. But in that same Labor-Health bill, if you are from Alaska, you bring home $47 per person. And then if you look at what else Alaska gets, they get $123 per person in the VA-HUD bill, they get $192 per person in the Transportation bill, and they get $220 per person from the Commerce-Justice bill. That means that special grants to Alaska wind up totaling $638 per person in comparison to the table scraps that I just explained for States like Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, California and the like.

Mr. Speaker, the appropriations process used to be the main task of government. The main task of the Congress each year was to pass the 13 appropriation bills which funded all of the financial activities of government. The appropriation bills used to provide an opportunity for a debate on priorities. Instead, what has happened is that the number of earmarks, the number of pieces of pork have become so numerous that Members of Congress have changed their focus and today instead of asking ``Where's the beef?'' in terms of funding levels for education or for health care or for science, instead they are asking, ``Where's the pork and how much did I get?''

And what has happened is that these projects are now being used to entice Members into only asking one question: How much did I get in pork? Rather than what were we able to do to improve the program funding for education or health care or environmental protection or you name it. I think that fundamentally corrupts the appropriations process, I think it makes us all simply ATM machines rather than policymakers, and I think it does no credit whatsoever to the Congress as an institution.

I want to point out, in a troubled agency like NASA, in 1995 there were two special earmarks that were provided. Today there are 104. Over the past few years since 1998, $1.7 billion has been diverted from regular NASA appropriations, a very troubled agency with serious safety problems; $1.7 billion has been diverted from those regular programs to industrial parks or museums or other local projects.

In the Commerce-Justice bill in 1995, there were 45 projects costing the taxpayer $104 million. Last year, Mr. Speaker, there were 996, costing the taxpayer over $1 billion. There has been a 4,200 percent increase in earmarks for the Justice Department over that same period of time.

So, Mr. Speaker, I am going to urge that we vote ``no'' on this bill. This bill is a gratuitous insult to every worker who is entitled to overtime pay. It is an outrageous neglect of the workers who ought to see their elected representatives pushing for expanded unemployment compensation for the long-term unemployed. This bill falls seriously short of the funding that this Congress itself promised in the Republican budget resolution just 5 months ago for education. It falls far short of where we need to be in the area of health care. It falls half a billion dollars short of where we ought to be in providing aid to our local and State levels of government for law enforcement assistance. And I think the way in which the earmarking process has gradually moved from something which was a tolerable and understandable effort on the part of the Congress to shift a small number of financing decisions to Congress into a decision-making process in which the total dominant consideration is simply congressional pork rather than substance in programs. I think when we do that, we fundamentally erode the confidence that each individual Member has in this institution, and I think we erode the confidence that every taxpayer has in this institution. I regret that.

This bill is a spectacular example of legislation and political pressure run amuck, and I would urge a ``no'' vote on the legislation.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, once again we have heard the gentleman in the well, on behalf of the Republican Party, try to make the case that somehow the Republican Party was responsible for the education budget increases of the last 2 years. For the Republicans to take credit for increases in education spending over the last 8 years, Mr. Speaker, is like Saddam Hussein taking credit for providing the Third Infantry Division safe passage to Baghdad.

The fact is that the majority party leadership fought every step of the way to prevent us from being able to eventually add the $19 billion in education funding that we provided, because of Democratic pressure over the past 8 years, $19 billion above the amount that the Republicans tried to put in their own education bill when those bills were before the House.

The Republican Party leadership fought us every step of the way. That increase in $19 billion happened over their dead bodies, politically speaking, and in spite of every trick that their leadership could concoct to stop it from happening. They refused to give the subcommittees an allocation that would allow meaningful increases. They broke every arm on their side of the aisle to force people to vote for lower funding levels when the bills went to the floor. When that technique failed, they refused to allow the bills to be considered on the floor. When that did not work, and when they finally had to go to conference, and often they had the conference legislation that had never even been considered in the House because of the inadequacy of their allocation, they then blocked the conferees from reaching agreement between the two Houses because the funding levels for education would be too high in their judgment. They relented only at the very last minute

when conceding on education funding that increases that we were asking for was the only way to end the session and get the Congress out of town.

On one occasion they even agreed to allow a funding level for education to be reported out of the conference and then decided they could not tolerate such a high level of support and forced the bill back into conference to strip out increases in education funding. For the Republican Party members of this House to claim that somehow they were responsible for those education budget increases, makes Pinocchio look like Honest Abe by comparison. The credibility gap that we have on the Republican side of the aisle has grown faster than Pinocchio's nose. So I just want to suggest, Mr. Speaker, that it is crocodile tears to hear the Republicans profess that they really are friends of education.

I also would like to point out one other thing, a newspaper ad which appeared in the Washington Post today. It reads ``The most outrageous Christmas list in America.'' It says ``It's called the omnibus. No, it's not Santa's sleigh, but it is laden with presents. It's coming to Washington D.C. this week. And you better believe the Bush Administration's best friends have front row seats.

``Having failed to pass seven of the Federal Government's 13 budget bills, the White House and Republican congressional leaders have rolled them all into one massive package dubbed `the omnibus.'

``So who does President Bush think is naughty and nice? Apparently no one is more deserving than Rupert Murdoch and his fellow network moguls. Despite the wishes of Congress and the vast majority of Americans, the President insists the omnibus include a relaxation of media antitrust rules. Now, the biggest networks will be able to acquire more of the hugely profitable local stations they desire.

``American workers, on the other hand, must have been very naughty. The omnibus bill eliminates extended unemployment benefits for millions of jobless. And 8 million workers who currently have Federal overtime protection lose their right to extra pay for those extra hours.''

That is the problem with this bill, Mr. Speaker, and I urge a ``no'' vote.

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

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman has two remaining speakers, I would ask him to use one of them now, and then I will close.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman has one remaining speaker?

Mr. Speaker, I am waiting until the gentleman has one speaker. He does not have the right to two closing speeches. I have got the right to have the second to the last speech.

Mr. Speaker, I understand the gentleman indicates he has two remaining speakers; so I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3\1/3\ minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I simply want to say that I agree very much with the remarks of the distinguished majority leader that this legislation is a fitting close to this session, because this congressional session has been marked from start to finish with an iron-hard determination to do what was necessary to deliver the most to those who have the most in this society.

We started with tax cuts which aimed a huge percentage of the benefits to those who are most well-off in our society, giving huge benefits to the most well-off 1 percent who earn more than $330,000 a year. Yet this same Congress denied tax cuts to persons whose income is so limited that they had to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. They were not allowed to come to the table to get their share of the tax cut.

This is the same Congress which, even as it walks out the door, having provided in the energy bill fiscal health to companies like Hooters, this is the same Congress that now says, ``Oh, but, by the way, no, we will not provide a last-minute bit of help to workers who have been out of work for an extended period of time.'' They refuse to allow States to provide additional unemployment compensation for the long-term unemployed.

This truly is a fitting close to the Congressional Record, which we have sadly seen since the beginning of January.

With respect to the gentleman's comments about this Congress being a paragon of fiscal responsibility and virtue, I simply want to announce that I am perfectly willing right here and now to give the majority leader the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, because this is the same Congress and this is the same White House that has shown so much fiscal responsibility that in 3 short years they have taken us from a $230 billion surplus to a record $375 billion-plus deficit. That is some fiscal responsibility. I think Mr. Webster would weep if we asked him to put that definition in the dictionary.

I want to say one more time, Mr. Speaker, with all of the gifts that are given in the energy bill to the special interests, with all of the gifts that are given in this bill to many special interests throughout the land, with all of the gifts that were given to special interests in the tax bill, it seems to me that we could at least provide some additional benefits to the long-term unemployed. But, no, no, no, that does not fit in the Christmas plans for the Scrooges who are running the other party on the other side of the aisle.

The motto for this Congress when it comes to working people ought to be ``Bah, humbug,'' because that is what the record looks like.

Mr. Speaker, I ask for a ``no'' vote.

Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the following article from the December 8 edition of the National Journal's Congress Daily AM bulletin, which comments on the choice of the Appropriation process by the majority party.

[From the Congress Daily AM, Dec. 8, 2003]

The Triumph of Pettiness

(By David Hess)

The partisan bitterness that has suffused Congress over the

past decade has reached a new level. Democrats have long

grumbled about power-mad Republicans who will stoop to

anything to exert their will. Republicans grouse about fault-

finding, obstructionist Democrats and speak of getting even

for long-ago Democratic abuses. But up to this point, in the

rough and tumble of parliamentary skirmishing, both sides

have largely refrained from sweeping, systematic legislative

blackmail.

Now the wraps are off even that. Furious about opposition

to key spending bills, Republican leaders have dropped the

hammer on hometown projects--known as ``earmarks''--sponsored

mostly by Democrats but also by some Republicans who have

balked at runaway spending in some of the bills.

The first round of earmark trashing came in a big bill

funding the Labor Department and HHS; that legislation

contains about $180 million for local projects. The second

came when the GOP leadership wreaked vengeance on 100 members

of both parties who voted last summer against the VA-HUD

spending bill; approximately $750 million in earmarks are in

that legislation. After some finagling, House Labor-HHS

Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member David Obey, D-

Wis., managed to restore about $20 million worth of

Democrats' projects and program enhancements in the Labor-HHS

spending bill. But major damage to the House's sense of

comity had been done.

``If they don't support the bills [in committee and on the

floor], then they shouldn't expect to get their projects,''

said Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, a senior member of the House

who chairs the Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee.

Coming from regula--who for 40 years has served with

distinction from the Ohio General Assembly to the U.S. House

and enjoys a reputation as a fair and decent legislator--that

was a stunning remark. For it bespeaks a vindictive attitude,

prevalent now in the House in both parties, that poisons the

diminishing fount of civility in an institution at its best

when each party respects the other's right to act in

principled opposition--without fear of petty retribution--on

the issues of the times.

Beyond that, this brand of political blackmail is

misguided. It is the scattershot tactic of ruthless partisans

lashing out in fury to inflict damage on critics who have

every right--if not the duty to their constituents'

interests--to express their criticism of policy choices. And

who exactly is being punished? Certainly not the members who

dared oppose the legislation on policy grounds. The real

victims are the folks back home, Republicans as well as

Democrats and independents, taxpayers all, who stand to

benefit from the earmarked projects.

In Racine, Wis., for example, citizens will go without a

$400,000 water-treatment process to screen out a dangerous

pathogen, cryptosporidium, which causes serious and even

lethal intestinal disease. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., the

project's sponsor, had voted against the FY04 VA-HUD bill

because it cut spending for veterans below the amount

provided in the Republicans' budget resolution.

Then there's the case of Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., a

member of the Appropriations Committee, who in last year's

Labor-HHS spending bill managed to secure funding for four

projects--two for hospitals, two for universities--worth a

total of $1.3 billion. This year he voted against both the

Labor-HHS and VA-HUD bills, on policy grounds, when they

reached the House floor. He paid a stiff price for his

opposition votes. Only one project, $150,000 in the Labor-HHS

bill to expand an emergency room in Newburgh's St. Luke's

Hospital, made the cut. Hinchey is not even certain it would

have survived, had New York's senators not supported the

project.

The lame excuse is often made that the exigencies of party

discipline require stern measures to whip the members into

line. But what about the power of good policy ideas and moral

suasion to convince, rather than bludgeon, balky members who

harbor reasonable doubts about the impact of pending

legislation on their districts? Or the effect on principled

advocates, liberal and conservative alike, who oppose on

deeply felt philosophical grounds the options dictated by

party leaders? Are the leaders so hell-bent on winning they

must resort to strong-arm tactics, rather than persuasion and

the often-small compromises that win over reluctant members?

In reflecting on the head-bashing partisanship so manifest

in Congress, this writer wonders what his later mother--a

stalwart, lifelong Republican--would have thought about such

behavior by the leaders of her party. The GOP embodied the

values she held dear: individualism, self-dependence, fiscal

integrity, personal enterprise, fair play and charity for the

worthy. She would have given short shrift to the small-

minded, mean-spirited, punitive and divisive tactics this

sort of blackmail entails.

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

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I do so for the purpose of yielding to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) so that he may explain what changes this entails to the continuing resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to take this time to comment on the legislation just filed. The legislation just filed would complete the work of the Committee on Appropriations and the Congress on a number of appropriation bills which were not able to get through the system one by one, as is the usual process. But in the process of putting together this omnibus appropriation bill, the House has, I think, reached a new low in terms of its willingness to reflect the will of the membership.

We elect in this country 535 people to come to this Congress, 435 of them in this institution; and the idea is that those Members are supposed to vote on various issues, and after those Members have voted, then a conference committee between the Senate and the House is supposed to iron out whatever differences remain between the House and the Senate in the consideration of that legislation.

That is really not what happened on this legislation this year. Time and time again, the conferees simply disregarded the will of Members of both Houses, went into a back room, and decided on their own, without consulting anybody but themselves and the White House, that they were going to cut the cards a different way and deal a new hand to everyone.

So we find, for instance, that in the legislation just filed, even though both Houses of Congress in public, on-the-record votes made the decision to try to scale back the expansion of the ability of large businesses in the communications industry to own television stations, despite the fact that both branches of the Congress voted to put a 35 percent cap on the percentage of American homes that should be reachable by any one corporate entity in the television business, despite that fact, the conferees produced legislation just filed at this moment which changes that cap and raises it to 39 percent. No votes taken in either House to do that, just an arbitrary judgment because the White House said, ``If you do not do it our way, we are going to hold our breath and turn blue.''

So the conferees caved and went against the position of both Houses. I think that is a national scandal. This is a backroom deal to strengthen the hands of the national media giants against local control of television. It allows ABC and NBC to acquire additional stations up to the new 39 percent limit, and it takes Fox and CBS off the hook so that they do not have to divest as they would have had to if the will of the House and the Senate had prevailed.

I am also concerned about what has happened here with the across-the- board cut that is being provided in this legislation because, as I understand the impact of that cut, that is going to mean a reduction of $178 million in crucial veterans medical care; and it is going to, as I understand it, severely hamper the VA in its ability to reduce the backlog in handling cases brought to them by veterans. It now takes about 157 days to process a veteran's claim; and this across-the-board cut in the operations of the VA will, I am afraid, result in seeing those delays expanded rather than contracted.

I also want to take just a moment to point out that this institution has engaged in a very questionable practice with respect to congressional earmarks. In the past, there is no question that Congress had provided significant numbers of earmarks. But in the past 4 or 5 years, in my view, that has gotten incredibly out of control. There is nothing wrong with Congress deciding to take a reasonable number of projects through earmarks in order to give this institution an opportunity to define what activities it considers to be very important; but when the practice explodes to such a degree that virtually every university hires a lobbyist to try to obtain funds through the political process rather than the process of peer review, then the Congress abandons all pretext of taxpayers' moneys being used in rational fashion.

The other problem, Mr. Speaker, is that when earmarks change in character from being a convenience to Members to a weapon in the hands of the majority party to punish Members of the minority party who oppose those appropriation bills, then we have, I think, fundamentally corrupted the appropriations process of the House, and I think it becomes a source of shame for the House in many ways. We have had a huge explosion in the amount of Member-directed earmarks over the past 4 or 5 years; and I would say that when that is accompanied by the idea that Members will be punished if they vote on the basis of substance, then I think this Congress ceases to be a body which can earn the respect of the American people. It seems to me that if we are going to allow earmarks to be used as a partisan threat, then what we will do is eliminate the ability of the appropriations process to be considered on the merits, and the only thing Members will be focused on will be their local pork projects rather than the broader welfare of the country; and I think that will demean the process of the Congress and demean the American people in the process.

Mr. Speaker I yield myself 6 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, as this joint resolution demonstrates, we are in another year that simply refuses to end. Last year we did not see this Congress finish the work that was supposed to be done by October 1 until well into the winter of the next calendar year. At that time the majority party in the House blamed that inability to get the work done on the fact that there was a majority of the other party in the other body.

This year they do not have Tom Daschle to kick around anymore. This year the Republicans control it all. They control the White House. They control the House. They control the Senate. They control the schedule. They control what gets to the floor. They control how long the votes are held open. They control everything. And yet we are in a situation where tonight, long after the fiscal year is supposed to be over, we still have not seen the budgets passed for VA-HUD, for the State Department, for the Justice Department, for the Commerce Department. We have yet to see the foreign aid budget pass. We have yet to see the budget for the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, social services agencies pass and the agriculture budget. I think we ought to ask why.

I do not believe that we are in this box because of any failure of the Committee on Appropriations leadership. I think we are in this box because the Republican House leadership is insisting on having every decision made in a top-down style. That means that the only real decisions that count except on minor matters are those made in the office of the Speaker or in the office of the majority leader.

No conferees are appointed unless they agree with the leadership's position on major issues. And yet even after rigging those conferences, even after stacking those conferences, when they still cannot win the votes that they need to win in those stacked conferences, they simply adjourn those conferences and then put legislation together in some off-corner office without any meaningful participation by anybody except perhaps some unelected members of the leadership's staff. So much for the legislative process in what used to be regarded as the greatest deliberative body in the world.

This process is about as respectful of rank and file Members as an AARP board meeting is respectful of the senior citizens they supposedly represent. On the same night that legislation is going to be considered that will bankrupt Medicare, we see the ultimate degradation of the legislative process at the same time as it is demonstrated in the appropriations process.

It is not often, Mr. Speaker, that one can do in senior citizens and the democratic process on the same night, but the House leadership should be congratulated because they have managed to find a way.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, as the gentleman from Florida has indicated, the Commerce-Justice bill could very easily have been brought back to this floor separately and passed separately. The Transportation bill could very easily have been brought back to the floor and passed separately. The Foreign Operations bill could very easily have been brought back to the bill floor and passed separately. The Agriculture the same and the VA-HUD bill the same.

The problem is, as the gentleman indicated, that there are many other issues that are being drug into the appropriations process. And we also see the situation complicated by the fact that the House Republican leadership, despite votes to the contrary on a number of issues, is insisting on seeing an outcome on a number of these issues which is at variance with the expressed wishes of the Members of the House. And I think therein lies the reason for the delay and delay and delay.

I think the problem that we have, Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Florida, my good friend, indicated that the committee product is serving as a magnet for other authorizations. I think a better metaphor would be that it is looking more and more like a garbage truck. And the problem we have is that this bill has not been allowed to proceed because I think the House leadership is still trying to determine what bags of garbage have to be tossed down to the truck before the truck is driven through here in the dead of night.

So that is the choice that we face, Mr. Speaker. It is not a pretty sight, and the outcome is not going to be very good. But there is not much we in the minority can do to affect either the scheduling or to affect how much garbage is tossed on the truck before it is run through the Capitol. I just hope the smell is not too bad before it is over.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``yes'' vote on the resolution.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I simply take the time to indicate that the House has no choice but to proceed to pass the short-term CR in hopes that the House will come closer to finishing its work by the time we have to pass another one. But let me also say that I would hope that we would use the time constructively so that Members still can get out of here for the year on a reasonable schedule.

I note last night, for instance, that we are within a hair's breadth of having total agreement on the VA-HUD appropriations and on the CJ bill. The transportation bill has already been filed, and it is hoped that the foreign ops bill will be filed and acted upon also. That would mean that we could reduce considerably the number of bills that would have to go into the omnibus. I have no particular ax to grind about whether they do or they do not, but it would seem to me that it would be one way to at least assist on unsnarling what remains to be done before we finish.

With that, I would simply say when the CR comes, I hope that we could dispose of it in a favorable fashion so we can get on with the remainder of our work for this week.

Mr. Speaker, I simply urge a ``yes'' vote, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Madam Speaker, I think one of the obligations of those of us in the minority is to raise objection when we believe that the majority has not handled legislation correctly and to indicate support when we think it has handled things correctly. I want to stipulate that, in this instance, I think the gentleman from Ohio (Chairman Hobson) has done a wonderful job in seeing to it that the Congress addresses its institutional responsibilities in the areas under the energy and water bill jurisdiction, and I think he has done an excellent job in involving the minority in reaching those decisions. In the process, it has been very apparent that the primary consideration of the chairman of the subcommittee has been the substance of the legislation, and he has tried to take the conference in a direction which defends the public interest irrespective of what either some people in the Congress or some people in the executive branch of government have felt about these issues. So I simply want to take this time to congratulate the gentleman from Ohio (Chairman Hobson) and to congratulate the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Visclosky), the ranking minority member on the subcommittee, because they have handled this bill in a way which, in my view, all appropriations bills should be handled, all legislation should be handled, for that matter. And in the process, while I certainly do not agree with every provision in the bill, I think the process has been reasonable enough and the substance is reasonable enough that this bill merits support on both sides of the aisle, and I am pleased to report that to the House.

Madam Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself 8 minutes.

Madam Speaker, to the uninitiated, people might think that this is a motion that deals with the agriculture appropriations bill. But, in fact, what is happening today is that conferees are being appointed, ostensibly, to deal with the agriculture appropriations bill but, in fact, the agriculture appropriation will then become the vehicle into which all other appropriation bills that have not yet passed the Congress will be dumped, producing one of those glorious omnibus appropriation bills that the Congress deals with at the end of the session when it has not been able to get its work done. So Members can expect to see this conference come back containing not only the material that is appropriate to the agriculture bill, but if the majority has its way, they can expect that the conference report will also contain the State, Justice, and Commerce appropriation, the Labor, Health, and Human Services appropriation, perhaps the VA-HUD appropriation, the D.C. appropriation, and perhaps several others. On this side of the aisle, we do not believe that those bills should be considered together. We believe that each of them should stand on their own merits.

We have another complicating factor, because this legislation will be used by the majority to try and pave the way for passage of its ill- conceived and misbegotten Medicare, so-called Medicare Reform Act. Now, that bill started as an effort to provide a prescription drug benefit for our senior citizens under Medicare. Instead, what is being produced on that score is a very weak, badly-shredded, partial benefit that does not even begin until years down the road, and the enticement of that prescription drug bill or that prescription drug coverage, I should say, is

being used as an effort to blackmail Congress into essentially vitiating Medicare as we know it today. There are not many people on this side of the aisle who think that that is a good idea either.

Now, one of the provisions in the Medicare conference report that will shortly be before this body is a provision which tries to create the impression that senior citizens will be allowed to reimport drugs from Canada as part of the passage of that bill. But, in fact, the FDA has made quite clear that that provision will not work. So what we are going to be faced with is a ``let's pretend'' game. The Congress will pretend in the Medicare bill that it is about to pass that there is a meaningful ability for seniors to reimport drugs at a lower cost from Canada when, in fact, because that provision requires the approval of the very agencies that are opposed to it, no such reimportation will ever take place.

So this Congress, in essence, intends on the Medicare reform bill to practice consumer fraud on the House Floor. This bill is part of that scheme, because this bill presently contains a requirement, in the form of the Northup amendment, that drug reimportation, meaningful drug reimportation be allowed to take place. But the intention of the conferees, at least on the majority side, is to deep-six that provision in conference so that the bill will come back stripped of that, and they will pretend that they have taken care of the need in the Medicare bill but, in fact, the Medicare bill will not have taken care of it at all. It sounds complicated; it is meant to be. Because that is the way that the public is deceived into thinking that there will be real action on reimportation of drugs from Canada when, in fact, the majority has no intention whatsoever of allowing that to occur.

So, therefore, I am offering this motion which says, in effect, that on this bill, if we are going to have a drug reimportation proposal, and I have some questions about the advisability of some of those proposals, but what this motion says is that if we are going to have a drug reimportation provision, it at least ought to be a real one, and that is what we believe the Northup amendment is, in contrast to the phony ``let's pretend'' proposition which will shortly be coming at us in the so-called Medicare reform bill.

So our position is very simple: this language gives people who want to have drugs reimported from Canada, lower-cost prescription drugs, this gives people who want to see that happen an opportunity to vote to require it. This is an effort to keep a real drug reimportation provision before the Congress rather than simply allowing the institution to engage in this widespread charade that somehow there is a meaningful reimportation provision in the Medicare bill which is about to come at us.

A lot of things will happen in this House over the last week, in the closing week of the session, or what is expected to be the closing week of the session. A lot of things will happen which will not bring credit to this House. What I would hope is that we could avoid having a broad- scale consumer fraud effort take place on this House floor and, in my view, without the Northup amendment, any pretense that there is a drug reimportation provision that is being made available to seniors will be just that, a blatant effort to defraud the public. I would hope that the membership of this House would recognize that, and I would hope that the members of the general public who have been waiting for years for a meaningful provision on drugs would remember it as well.

So for those of my colleagues who are interested in having reimportation actually occur, this motion is in support of the only real proposition that will be before the Congress between now and adjournment, and we will see whether Members, in fact, put their votes where their mouths are. Any Member who votes for the Medicare reform bill and claims that they have provided a drug reimportation plan that will provide lower-cost drugs from Canada will be committing consumer fraud, and I want to say that beforehand so that Members are put on notice as to what that provision really is. If my colleagues want to be real, vote for this motion. If they do not, do not. It is as simple as that.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, how much time is remaining on both sides?

And who has the right to close?

Madam Speaker, I yield 8 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller).

(Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Madam Speaker, how much time is remaining?

Could I ask the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bonilla), is it his intention not to yield any time?

Madam Speaker, is it the intention of the gentleman not to yield any time?

Madam Speaker, we have the right to close, so I am wondering when the gentleman is intending to use his time.

Madam Speaker, is the gentleman going to be supporting or accepting the motion?

Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kleczka).

Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel).

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

Madam Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen).

Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Ross).

Madam Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, this motion is an effort to prevent this Congress from giving to the drug companies two early Christmas presents.

Let me put it this way: this Congress is about to tell the drug companies that they will have carte blanche to do whatever they want on drug costs. And this Congress will accomplish that in two ways. The first step is by obliterating the efforts that we have tried to make to allow the Federal Government to negotiate with drug companies for a lower price for drugs by providing a drug benefit that goes to everyone under Medicare. The Medicare legislation, which this House will be asked to vote on this week, that Medicare legislation, at the instruction of the Republican leadership, has eliminated all possibility for the Federal Government to negotiate lower drug prices. That is gift number one to the drug companies.

That means the only remaining way that seniors can get some help on drug prices is by reimporting them from Canada. And the Medicare legislation which will shortly be before us will state that or will pretend that there is a Canadian drug reimport benefit but, in fact, has a benefit which the FDA itself says will not work. That means the only way left for Members to try to provide some degree of price protection for prescription drugs for seniors is to vote for this motion and to insist that this conference committee come back with the provision that was adopted in the original House legislation. That is why this motion is before us today. I would urge a ``yes'' vote on the motion.

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

Madam 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 10 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I think this would be a good time to try to analyze exactly why we are in the situation of having to again ask the House to pass yet another resolution keeping the government open until we finish our appropriations work. I note in the CongressDaily A.M. edition of this morning that there is a headline on page 12 which says: ``Senate Nearing Halfway Point on fiscal 04 Appropriation Bills.'' I thought that when a race was run that it would be over when it was over. But the fiscal year ended on October 1 and what this headline indicates is that the other body had not yet even run half the race. So I concur with the gentleman that a lot of these bills are dragging because the Senate has not yet been able to take them up.

But I think we need a little bit more detailed description of what has happened. As I see it, there is one bill which is hung up, the Labor, Health and Human Services bill, which is hung up because there are deep divisions between the two parties in this Congress about how adequately education is funded in that bill, how adequately research is funded under NIH; and there is also, I think, a deep division between us on how workers ought to be treated with respect to their overtime rights. And because our party believes that the bill is woefully inadequate on all three of those counts, we have not supplied votes for it on this side of the Capitol and are still hoping that the majority will come to its senses in terms of recognizing the need to at least provide the money which was provided in the Republican Party budget resolution for education and for special education.

But once we get beyond the Labor, Health and Human Services bill, I find the story even more interesting. The other bill that was passed with deep divisions between the two parties in this House was the District of Columbia appropriation bill. That bill passed almost exclusively with Republican votes because the Republican majority saw fit to include the controversial issue of vouchers. So they went beyond where they could go and still maintain a bipartisan consensus for that bill and in the process lost the votes of most of the people on this side of the aisle.

In the other body, the other body has not yet even taken up that bill because not only Democrats, but I think moderate Republicans in that body, recognize that that bill was passed by the House in a shape too partisan or at least too ideological in order to be able to pass muster. So that is being held up for that reason.

Then we have the Energy and Water appropriations bill which passed both Houses with over 90 percent of the vote. In fact, the Senate vote was unanimous; and yet because of majority party scheduling decisions in the Senate, that bill was not considered until September 16 even though it passed the House on July 18. And I want to say that I am happy that finally today we have come to an agreement in conference. I think the gentleman from Ohio (Chairman Hobson) did a good job on that. But, nonetheless, it was the majority party scheduling problems in the Senate which delayed consideration of this conference until this week.

Then we take a look at the Military Construction bill, the bill that was just disposed of. That bill passed unanimously in this House, and it passed by a vote of 91 to 0 in the Senate. It passed the Senate on July 11, and yet the bill was held up until today because of differences within the majority party about how the funds ought to be allocated. Then if we take a look at the Transportation bill, that bill passed the House very late in the cycle, September 9. It took that long to pass it because the subcommittee produced a product which not even the majority party Members in this House could support without substantial repair. Finally, after it was somewhat repaired, the bill passed the House with 85 percent of the votes of both parties; and yet it did not pass the other body until October 23, some 3 weeks after the deadline for the fiscal year.

So, again, majority problem scheduling problems determined the delay for that bill.

Then if you take a look the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs and Housing, that bill passed with over 75 percent support in both parties when it passed the House. The other body has not yet taken up the bill. So, again, we have scheduling decisions by the majority party which have determined that this bill will be late to the gate.

I think there is an understandable reason for that, because the substance of the bill is unacceptable in large part to the veterans community in this country because it shortchanges needed veterans funding by more than $1.3 billion. So I do not blame the majority party for being discombobulated because it is having a debate with itself about how it can correct that problem.

Then we have the Foreign Operations bill, which passed the House on July 24. It did not pass the Senate until October 30, 1 month after the expiration of

the fiscal year. Again, even though that passed the House with huge bipartisan agreement, it was hung up because of scheduling decisions and scheduling problems in the other body by the majority party because their party was split around the edges on issues such as Mexico City and concern about the fact that HIV funding was not adequately handled in that legislation.

Then we have the Agriculture bill, which passed the House on July 14 with support of more than 75 percent of Members of both parties. It passed this House on July 14, well before the end of the fiscal year. But, again, because of majority party scheduling decisions in the Senate, the Senate has yet to take up that bill. That is being hung up, as I understand it, over questions that relate to changing the authorization for the farm bill.

Then, lastly, we have Commerce-Justice-State, which passed this House with over 90 percent of both parties voting for it, and yet the Senate has yet to take up this bill. So, again, a majority party scheduling problem has led to a long delay in consideration of this bill.

I would simply say, Mr. Speaker, I do not know how long it is going to take before the majority party is able to overcome their differences with themselves, but I do hope that they recognize that we are ready and anxious to help if they will produce bills which meet at least minimal standards for meeting the needs of the country in areas such as veterans' health care, education, special education and aid to our local law enforcement officials, who will see a large squeeze on traditional law enforcement programs such as the Byrne Grants, unless some substantive decisions are made that produce a different bill than we are facing today.

Mr. Speaker, that is my analysis of why we are sitting here with so much of the appropriations work still not done.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 10 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I think that what the distinguished minority whip has just told the House is right on the button; and I want to emphasize, I do not believe these decisions, I do not believe that these practices, are being imposed upon the House and the Congress because of the desires of the people who run this committee. This committee has had an honorable tradition of dealing fairly with the majority and minority Members alike ever since I have been here. In my early years, I think junior Democrats were as unhappy with some of the decisions that were made by senior Democrats as some of the Republicans were. The unhappiness was bipartisan. And I think in that sense things have changed because today, many of the decisions that affect the way this committee works are being made, as the gentleman from Maryland said, at a higher pay grade. But I think the result is, unfortunately, that we have many closed-door decisions being reached in a closed-minded atmosphere, and that does the House no good in the long term.

What has happened, I think, is that we have seen almost an unparalleled institutional arrogance on the part of the leadership of the majority party in the way they conduct this House's business.

First of all, they have assured that when each of the appropriation bills has come to the floor, they have come to the floor under conditions which guarantee that no meaningful, comprehensive alternatives can be offered which differ in any significant way with the priorities mandated by the majority party leadership. They bring bills to the floor which have been exempted from the normal rules, processes, and procedures of the House so that the committee product produced by the Republican majority can have the luxury of not having to compete with any other significant approaches. But then, they say that proposals that the minority party seeks to offer will not be granted those same exceptions from the rules and procedures of the House. That creates a very uneven playing field, and it is intended to do that.

And then, when that happens, and when bills pass because we have no way of reaching them and changing them in a significant way, then we run into a situation where, as the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) says, in many instances conferences are simply conferences between a few well-connected people on the majority side of the aisle, with no real consultation with the minority. That can occur anytime that the leadership wants to exercise their ability to find 218 votes for their product.

But it is not democracy. It is not the kind of collegial vetting of differences that we have had in this House through the years. It is simply an arrogant assertion of will. It is a power play on the part of the majority party. And the purpose is not just to hold the minority party in check; the purpose is to, by their actions, hold Members of the majority party under control, so that no one does too much thinking for himself, so that no one will dare to say, ``Well, I think there ought to be a different path that is pursued.''

So, Mr. Speaker, having said that, I want to emphasize again, I recognize the effort of the gentleman from Florida to be fair; but I also recognize that sometimes he has to be a loyal soldier, and I think if he were to run these conferences in a way that suited his desires, some of them would be run quite differently.

Having said that, Mr. Speaker, the matter before us, as the gentleman from Florida has indicated, is simply whether or not we should keep the government open for another short period while these differences are resolved. We have no choice but to do so. So I urge a ``yes'' vote on the resolution.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, as everyone knows, we are supposed to have our appropriation bills done by the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1. Right now, even if we pass the Interior bill today, the bill to which the distinguished gentleman from Florida has just referred, we will still have 9 of 13 appropriation bills that are pending, and only God knows when we are going to finish them.

This continuing resolution keeps the government open until November 7. It is a very short CR, highly unrealistic in my view, if people have any expectation that this is going to be the last CR that we need. That means that the good news is we are going to get to do this all over again next week and the following week and probably the following week. I distinctly hope that we can be finished here by Thanksgiving. I desperately hope that we can, but my experience and my instincts are beginning to tell me that that is not at all likely.

I notice that the reports this morning in the National Journal's Congress Daily, I notice the report there, and in one of the newspapers this morning, I have forgotten if it was Roll Call or The Hill, which indicated that the Speaker himself is contemplating the possibility of our adjourning until January 15 because of the inability of the House and the Senate to get together on a variety of bills, not just appropriation bills, but also bills like the energy bill and the Medicare bill.

If we wind up doing that, it will be in essence a repeat of last year. And it means that we will be still dealing with last year's business midwinter of next year, and that will put the entire system again months behind where it ought to be, and God help us, there is an election year coming up, Presidential election year which is going to chew up a good piece of July and August.

So I see here confusion and chaos. And I would point out that when this happened in the last Congress, the majority party had a convenient target. They tried to blame it all on good old Tom, Tom Daschle, the then-majority leader in the Senate. Well, to paraphrase what President Nixon said once, the majority party does not have the Democratic majority to kick around anymore because the party, the Republican Party is in control of both Houses. And the White House. And so any delays that we have in passing appropriation bills or other bills for that matter, any delays we are experiencing come because the Republican majority is having an argument with itself, between its House Members and its Senate Members.

I think one of the reasons that this is dragging everything behind again is because, as we all know, there has been a conscious decision, certainly on the part of the leadership of this House, there has been a conscious decision on the part of the Republican leadership to run this House on the narrowest of partisan majorities, rather than putting together bipartisan compromises on each of the 13 appropriation bills. The most spectacular example of that is the Labor Health appropriation bill. The choice has been made to try to govern with only Republican votes.

Now, if you have 300 people who are in support of a bill, it makes it a whole lot easier to get your work done because you have a much wider margin of error. But if you are only trying to run the House with a narrow margin of 220 or 230 votes, then every time you lose five or six votes, it is a big problem because that slows the train down.

So I think there is a lesson in here somewhere if the Republican Party leadership wants to hear it, and the lesson is, that if you reach out and try to reach bipartisan conclusions, the House runs more smoothly and you have a much better chance of not having every little disagreement within your own party lead to delay, delay and more delay. That is just a pragmatic observation, and I would urge that the House leadership take it to heart. I have no expectation that they will, Mr. Speaker, but I wish they would.

I think the problem that we have is that even within the Republican Party, there are a substantial number of Members, if not in this House then in the other body, who have substantial concerns about some of the appropriation bills. Example: Veterans health care has been a huge issue since the President presented his budget, and veterans groups all over the country are objecting to the inadequate level provided for veterans health care, but the VA HUD bill that left the House did not contain sufficient funding for veterans health care even to satisfy Republican Senators. So we had the Senate adopt, because they could not get the VA HUD bill to the floor, we had the Senate Republicans offer a motion which added $1.3 billion for veterans health care to, of all bills, the Iraqi supplemental.

Last night, the conference jettisoned that $1.3 billion and promised that they would put it on the VA HUD bill, but we have no idea whatsoever of how that will be done, whether it will be done by busting the caps, whether it will be done by providing emergency funding, whether it will be done by an across-the-board cut in other items in that bill. We just do not know.

And in that same bill, we have the problem of inadequate funding for local

law enforcement because the White House budget tries to pretend that it is funding homeland security items by reducing funding for the normal aid to local governments, local police departments, in the form of the Byrne Grants and other regular law enforcement programs.

We also have the problem of the Labor Health and Education bill where the education funding falls billions of dollars behind the No Child Left Behind Act which the President trumpeted so loudly just 2 years ago. We have a dispute between Republicans in both Houses over adequate funding levels for NIH, and I think there is considerable discomfort within the Republican Party, and certainly within ours, about the inadequate level of funding for special education for handicapped children.

My point is simply that we are here, late in the year certainly it is not unprecedented. It has happened before under both parties, but I do not recall in quite some time it being this chaotic. And I also believe that it would have been very easy to avoid had we had at least modest efforts at reaching a bipartisan approach to the budget resolution, for instance, which has caused the squeeze on appropriation bills.

So, Mr. Speaker, I think we have no choice but to pass this continuing resolution, but I think it is simply another small bridge to next week when we will have to pass yet another one, and I think the best way to break through this problem is not by exhorting people to reach agreement where there is no agreement. I think the best way to break through this problem is by changing the parameters so that we consider a broader-based compromise on some of these bills than has been considered to date.

That is the only way that I see that we can get out of here before Thanksgiving turkey time with any degree of satisfaction and self- respect. Certainly the gentleman from Florida was able to put his bills through the House in a timely fashion, but when such limitations have been imposed, as is the case in this session, it becomes almost impossible for the House and the Senate to reach agreement on time, even when one party is in control of all the levers of government as the majority party now is.

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

Mr. Speaker, I think we have two additional speakers at this time. I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Berry) a distinguished member of the committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha), the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Defense of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Let me simply say, Mr. Speaker, in response to the gentleman from California, that the last year the Democrats were in control, I was chairman. We finished every appropriation bill before the end of the fiscal year, not because there was anything special about me, but because my party leadership allowed me to walk across the aisle to work out a bipartisan allocation between the 13 subcommittees. Even then, we had two-thirds of the Republicans voting against the final product much of the time. But at least I was allowed to put together a bipartisan allocation of dollars, and that is why we were able to finish it on time.

That is in contrast to the instruction that the gentleman from Florida has unfortunately been given by his leadership, which has led to the fact that the Republicans at this point in the House and the Republicans in the Senate are losing an argument with themselves. That is the problem.

Mr. Speaker, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin).

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

Mr. Speaker, since I first came to this body in 1969, we have had divided control of government for all but 6 years. The only time we have had Democratic control of all of the power levels of government was the 4 year period under President Carter and the first 2 years under President Clinton. For the rest of that time, we have had divided government until the Republicans took the whole shebang in the last election.

It is clear that regardless of what we want to talk about in yesterday's chapters, the chapter being written today makes clear that the majority party is in control of all of the power levers of government, and they are in a very big debate with themselves. As a consequence, we again, as was the case last year, do not have the work done. That is not the fault of the gentleman from Florida. I do believe it is the fault of those who have decided that every issue will be decided within the Republican caucus rather than trying to work out more broad-based bipartisan bills.

Nonetheless, that having been said, we have no choice but to pass this resolution. I would hope that we would have a sense of realism about how to get the job done between now and Thanksgiving. I doubt that we are going to, so I am afraid the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and I will be back on the floor next week and the following week pursuing these week-to-week extensions. Sooner or later, we simply have to change the mind-set which has allowed this drift to continue.

Mr. Speaker, I ask for an ``aye'' vote on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, what the previous Member said was not in any way directed at the Committee on Appropriations. The Member was pointing out in a number of the authorizing committee conferences, that Members of the minority were excluded; and I might point out in the process, probably the public interest was excluded as well.

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 think this bill is a mixed bag. There is much in it to commend it, and I especially want to express my appreciation to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Taylor) for the way that he has fairly involved the majority and minority in the fashioning of this bill, and also for the fact that he has treated Members with great fairness in my judgment.

There are two problems that I see with the bill that I find troublesome. First, there are a number of what I consider to be antienvironmental riders involving Alaska and other areas. I would say, frankly, that these are not the worst antienvironmental riders I

have seen in an Interior bill, but I guess that is damning, by faint praise, from my perspective.

I think the basic problem is that the bill falls $447 million short of measuring up to the agreement that this committee signed on to 3 years ago. At that time, a majority of the House had signed on to what was known as the CARA bill which would have created land acquisition programs and land conservation programs as an entitlement. Those of us on the Committee on Appropriations thought institutionally that was the wrong thing to do, and so we tried to work out an alternative. And we did. That alternative said that funds for those programs would be first in line in this bill for the next 6 years, and we spelled out a specific funding schedule that was supposed to be met over that time period.

Unfortunately, the committee has now, in essence, walked away from that agreement. At the time that we entered into that agreement, because I was one of the parties to it, I pledged that if the committee at any time walked away from that agreement that I would vote against any legislation that was at variance with that agreement. And so I feel constrained to have to vote against the bill today. I am sorry about that, but I believe that we are making a long-term mistake, institutionally, by not living up to that agreement.

I recognize the committee is short of resources. I think that the House should have corrected that by making more resources available so we would have not been in this jackpot. Nonetheless we are, and so that is why I, despite many of the good things in the bill, feel constrained to vote against it when the rollcall is called.