Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I would simply say to the House, I do not even know what the content of most of these amendments is, but what is going on here is that the staff has been attempting to work out understandings under which a huge number of amendments can be disposed of in the most efficient way possible.

As I understand it, there are approximately 39 pending amendments which are probably in order and about 69 that are not, and those numbers may be off a little bit but they are not bad for government work at 8:30 in the middle of a Red Sox game. But having said that, what this represents is that the sponsors of these amendments have agreed--all but two of these amendments as I understand it are in order, and those amendments, the sponsors have agreed to a severe time limit in order to have them considered. And in the case of the two amendments offered by persons who did not have germane amendments, my understanding is that those Members have agreed to drop all of their other amendments in return for a 5-minute consideration for their amendment before the point of order is lodged.

I think that is roughly what it is that we are agreeing to, if this is, in fact, agreed to by the body. So it is simply an attempt to try to take a huge universe of amendments and to create some smaller, manageable universes so that we can move the process along.

Let me say that, without even knowing the content of these amendments, I have strong feelings about the fact that Members are being reduced to having important issues on something like this considered in such a reduced time frame, but that is the choice we have under the rule that we have been given, and so we can either try to extend Members opportunities as much as possible or not, and that is what we have been trying to do.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. Speaker, these amendments simply represent negotiations that we have been able to reach with the sponsors of the amendments. Negotiations are still going on with the other sponsors of the other amendments, and as those are resolved, the hope is to have other packages to bring before the House.

Mr. Chairman, my understanding is that under the unanimous consent request, pro forma amendments by the managers on each side are still allowed, is that correct?

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

Mr. Chairman, I just must respond to the comments made about the necessity to leave maximum flexibility with the Pentagon. I would simply observe that we did that with the last $60 billion that we gave them, and that is, I guess, how we came up with 40,000 troops that still did not have the Kevlar linings for their body armor; that flexibility is how we came up with an inadequate number of jammers so that our soldiers are still dying and being maimed by remotely detonated bombs; I guess that is why some of the Humvees over there still are not protected with Kevlar blankets; and I guess that is how we came up with the recommendation from the Pentagon that still leaves 80 percent of our troops in Iraq without drinkable water.

So I think we ought to keep that in mind when we hear these general discussions about the need for ``flexibility.'' Flexibility for people whose judgment has earned that flexibility is one thing; flexibility for people who have demonstrated an interest in keeping as much information away from the Congress as possible and who have a track record of making as many miscalculations as possible is not something that thrills me very much.

Amendment Offered by Mr. Holt

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

I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to myself to explain the procedure of the situation.

Mr. Speaker, we are proceeding under a very unusual circumstance to say the least. We will be having considerable discussion of a bill which is not yet before us but which will be before us tomorrow, assuming that the Committee on Rules brings out a rule that provides for its consideration tomorrow. Meanwhile, we will be having discussions about what the House anticipates will be on the floor tomorrow.

We have just had a half an hour description of a trip taken by one of the congressional delegations to Iraq, and we are now yielding for the next half an hour to other Members of the House who want to express their thoughts on the subject in general, and when we are finished with that half an hour, we will then be proceeding to additional debate, which is provided for on the House floor today through a unanimous consent agreement reached yesterday.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Visclosky).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 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.)

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 11 minutes. This is not a debate about 9/11. After 9/11, Chairman Young and I pushed through the House a $40 billion appropriation to respond to the events that led to that sneak attack. Chairman Young and I then led an effort to add billions of dollars to Homeland Security to protect our ports, secure air transportation and equip our local first responders, our firemen, our policemen to deal with a whole range of terrorist threats. We worked to add more than $2 billion in Homeland Security funds, even though the President threatened to veto those additional expenditures. Even the President of the United States has admitted publicly that there is no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with that sneak attack. So let us make that clear.

Secondly, let us also make clear that this should not be a debate about whether we should have attacked Iraq. Before the vote on that question, I asked a whole range of questions to try to determine whether the administration had real expectations and a real plan for dealing with the aftermath of the war. I wanted Saddam removed, but I wanted al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden removed even more. In the end, I voted to require the President to come back to Congress for another vote before attacking Iraq if he could not get the agreement of the United Nations so that we could take one last look at the evidence, one last look at the administration's planning for the aftermath before we pulled the trigger. But Congress gave the green light to attack unilaterally. The result, Saddam is gone, that is good, but now it appears that the administration sold the Congress on supporting a go- it-alone strategy, except for a British puppy, through the selective manipulation of intelligence.

This Congress was asked to do a rush job in providing $60 billion plus for the cost of going to war. We were asked to provide maximum flexibility in the use of that money, and Congress did. And now we find, with that maximum flexibility, that 40,000 troops were not supplied by the Pentagon with the correct body armor, American soldiers were killed and maimed by remotely detonated bombs because an insufficient number of electric jammers was supplied by the Pentagon, and there were days during the war when the troops only got one meal a day because of insufficient MREs.

We are now isolated from our allies, and we have been left holding the bag financially, militarily, and politically for occupying and reconstructing the country. We are told we do not have enough soldiers on the ground to even protect ammunition dumps from looting and theft. We are told that the military is stretched to the breaking point, creating opportunities for more mischief from countries like Iran and North Korea.

But that is all yesterday's argument. The time to think all of those things through was before we attacked, because once you are involved in a war, you are stuck with it for a while, and certainly you are stuck with the aftermath, as we are now. So at this point, I recognize the need and the obligation to support a reconstruction package. I agree that both reconstruction and additional military funding are needed to fix the situation. And I recognize that we cannot simply withdraw from something that we started, even though I was not in on the takeoff. But that does not mean that Congress must support any slap-dash request from the administration that is thrown on the table. The Founding Fathers gave us one overreaching power to affect major issues, the power of the purse. If we do not use that power constructively to make sure that actions of the executive branch are well-focused and well- thought-out, we are AWOL from our duty.

The fact is we still do not have a detailed accounting of how the dollars we previously appropriated for this action have been used. We still have no meaningful idea of what cost the administration expects to incur over the next 5 years, even though they surely have expectations about that and prepare 5-year plans for everything else under God's creation. We have yet to receive a realistic description of how our allies can be brought on board to help provide troops and funds to spread around the burden of reconstruction. We have no real idea about how the administration expects to deal with the overextension of our military and the disruption of troop rotation requirements because of that overextension. And we certainly do not know how we are going to pay for it, except to get out our kids' credit card and say, ``Charge it.''

There is no question in the aftermath of this administration and this Congress' decision to invade Iraq that we have now incurred certain obligations to the Iraqi people, but we have also obligations to our own people. That is why the important question here today is not whether this committee funding proposition, or an alternative, is better. The amendment that I will offer does not solve most of the dilemmas that I described or answer most of the questions that I have raised because only the administration has the power to do that. All the amendment that I will offer at some point says is: if you are going to spend $87 billion, then there is a better way to do it, a way which will be more effective on the ground and less damaging to our taxpayers.

The issue is not whether the administration's package should be cut or not because, frankly, I think the administration is still hiding from Congress its long-term expectations on the full cost of this war. But this Congress has an obligation to know what the whole picture is and what the whole bill will be before we write the check. And we have an obligation to know how it is going to be paid for. That is what the amendment that we will offer will try to do. That is all we can expect it to do at this point.

Let me take just a moment or two to describe what we will try to do with that amendment. We will try to reduce the committee package for reconstruction so that the total number for reconstruction is $14 billion rather than the $20 billion asked for by the administration. We will use that money in a number of ways. First of all, we would do it to provide a quality-of-life initiative for our troops. The first thing we would do under that heading is to recognize the fact that almost 80 percent of our troops today are in situations where they are forced to drink putrid water because the administration asked for sufficient funding only to deal with the water problems at one of the nine bases where American troops are stationed. So we provide the money to try to correct that problem for the rest of the troops.

Secondly, we would provide some of that money to provide predeployment health and dental screening for the Guard and Reserve forces who have to go into regular service so that they do not have to bear that cost themselves.

Thirdly, we extend postdeployment health coverage, (that is health coverage) for people who served and are now returning to their communities. We would extend that from the present 60 days to 6 months. And we would expand prepaid phone card services so it is easier for those troops to call home. And cover more R&R transportation costs.

We would also try to recognize what General Shinseki warned us about when he warned us not to follow a 12-division strategy if we only had a 10-division Army. And so what we will do is face up to, squarely and promptly, the need to increase the size of the Army by at least 20,000 people if we are going to be in a position to defend this country against other security problems that may develop anywhere from North Korea to Iran. And, secondly, we will try, by doing that, to relieve the pressure on the Guard and Reserve forces who have been forced to take up greater burdens than they expected when they first joined up.

Then we will provide additional funding to refurbish the equipment that has been used up in the Iraqi war. We know what the services indicated they needed in this fiscal year. The problem is the Pentagon civilian leadership did not ask for that full amount. We provide the full amount that the services asked for so that we do not have huge amounts of military equipment, tanks and Bradleys and other expensive equipment simply sitting in unusable condition because we have not sufficiently refurbished it.

Let me now turn to what we do with the $14 billion remaining in the redevelopment account. What we attempt

to do with that is to provide $7 billion of that, half of it roughly, a little less than $7 billion, in cash money, as the administration requested, so that they have enough money to deal with their immediate cash flow problems. Then we take the other six plus billion dollars and we put it in a special account in the World Bank to be matched on a two-to-one basis by foreign contributors. That is a way, in our view, that you can do two things. You can help to internationalize the question of who is going to pay for the long-term redevelopment costs of Iraq and at the same time we can protect the American taxpayer from the cronyism in the awarding of contracts that is bound to be there if those contracts are let by an agency that is responsive to the political appointees in the White House.

And then lastly and most importantly, in my view, we pay for it. What we simply say is that we should provide for a return to preexisting law of the levels of taxation for the very top bracket in this society, that top 1 percent that makes over $330,000 a year. What that would mean is that someone making $1 million, instead of getting a $130,000 tax cut, would get a tax cut of about $52,000. That would still be more than 10 times as much as taxpayers who are in the $200,000 to $500,000 bracket, and it would be considerably more than that if you compare what they get to the small tax cut of about $1,000 to people in the 50 to $75,000 bracket. So I would suggest that anyone who thinks that we are penalizing the top 1 percent, I would simply say that is certainly not the case. We are simply limiting the size of their tax cut to the size that will be provided to the next wealthiest Americans in the country. I daresay I think most of the people in that top 1 percent would say that if that is what is necessary to pay our bills rather than sending them on to our grandkids, they would be more than willing to participate.

Mr. Chairman, that is what we intend to try to accomplish as this debate moves forward.

Let me take one other moment to simply congratulate the chairman of the committee, because there is no question about it, he has made significant improvements in the administration proposal. Both parties wanted to eliminate some of the ``quaint'' items, to put it politely, that were inserted which would be red flags to any hardworking taxpayer in this country. And I appreciate the fact that we were able to work together to eliminate those provisions. But I think we have a long way to go to get the answers that we need from the administration in order to justify providing another $90 billion in taxpayers' money.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha), the ranking member of the Defense Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 7 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey), the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 10 seconds.

Two-run homer by Boston. They are ahead by three in the ninth.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran), a member of the Subcommittee on Defense of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Olver).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Berry), a member of the committee.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Baird).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Ms. Majette).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I cannot help but respond to some of the previous speaker's comments. The previous speaker quoted accurately President Kennedy who said that we would ``pay any price and bear any burden in the defense of freedom.'' That is a wonderful phrase. But my question is, what do you mean by ``we,'' ``we'' will bear any burden?

I want to know who is bearing any burden in this society for this effort right now, except for the troops and their families. How much of a burden are the politicians in this Chamber bearing? They are not facing up to the tough choices that are necessary to finance this war. How much of a burden are we asking the most well-off and privileged people in this society to pay, when the majority party and the White House insist on guaranteeing that, despite the need to pay for the war, they will still, that top 1 percent of earners will still get on average a $130,000 tax cut, rather than the $52,000 that they would get under the Obey amendment, those who make $1 million a year I am talking about?

If we are going to quote John Kennedy, let us live up to the spirit of Kennedy's remarks and support shared sacrifice for everyone, not just those who are serving in the military.

Mr. Speaker, Millie and Tip O'Neill were members of the Studs Terkel generation. They were Democrats because they saw the Democratic Party as a vehicle to help the common people of this country. They were Democrats who accepted human nature. They did not try to change people. They simply tried to appeal to their better natures. They just did not appeal to their common sense. They appealed to their sense of common justice.

Millie loved her man. She knew her man. She knew he was a strong man, but she also knew that he could be even stronger buttressed by love, and she gave of it fully. Millie would make every congressional spouse feel like she or he were welcome as family. They were two strong and good people who made their community and their country better for everybody.

In my view, Tip O'Neill's finest hour as a defender of this institution outside of the Watergate era came on a day after the regular order of business was done, just like today. Only in those days, during this period known as Special Order, the camera did not pan the Chamber. The camera simply focused closely on the person speaking in the well; and on one famous occasion, a young Newt Gingrich, later to become Speaker, took the well of the House and began a speech attacking Members on this side of the aisle, and with the camera close upon him, he challenged Members who were not there, but the camera gave the appearance that the Chamber was full. Mr. Gingrich challenged Members in an empty Chamber to answer him if his allegations were wrong.

Tip felt that that was a fundamental misleading of the American people. So he rushed to the House floor and told Mr. Gingrich what he thought of that kind of conduct. In my view, what he said may have been a technical violation of the rules; but in my view and in Millie's view, it should not have been, because in Tip's view and in her view and in the views of many of us, we thought that what Tip was saying was

the truth. Unfortunately, as was pointed out, sometimes truth is not a defense on this floor under the House rules, and so Millie was proud of the fact that Tip stood up for what he felt was right, as were we all that day.

I find it ironic that Millie died last night, just as the Boston Red Sox were winning the right to move on to the post-season series by seeing the last pitch of the game go the Red Sox way. As a huge, huge Red Sox fan, I know Tip would have been thrilled to see that; but with Millie's dying at that same time, she could at least rush and tell Tip the good news. So I think all of us are hoping that for the next 2 weeks Millie and Tip will have a good box seat in heaven, watching the Red Sox hopefully playing the Cubs in the World Series.

They brought grace to their State. They brought grace to this institution, and they brought good feelings and warmth and cheer and respect to all of us who knew them both; and I know that, as will the family, we will all miss both of them greatly.

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to instruct conferees.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, the House bill does not contain and the Senate Labor HHS bill does contain an important provision which affects millions of American workers. That provision would preclude the Department of Labor from issuing any regulation that takes away overtime protection from workers who currently qualify for that protection. It would protect rights that workers in this country have had since the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Under the Senate provision, the Department of Labor could proceed with its ongoing rulemaking process and modify the overtime regulations. Example: The department could proceed with making a long- overdue inflation adjustment that guarantees overtime protection for certain low-income workers earning $22,100 a year.

The Department of Labor says that this will result in an additional 1.3 million workers receiving overtime. I do not know if that estimate is right, but we agree with this provision. We, in fact, think that it would add far fewer number of workers than does the Department of Labor. The only shortcoming we see with it is that it does not go far enough and does not even keep pace with inflation, full adjustment to match inflation would require the department to increase the salary threshold in the rule to at least $27,560.

The Senate provision also would not stop the department from clarifying the overtime regulations to update them for the 21st century. For example, by eliminating an achronistic terms such as ``straw boss'' or ``gang leader'' or eliminating job classifications which no longer exist such as ``teamster''. Do not tell that to the Teamsters Union, however.

The Senate provision would provide the same protections to newly hired workers as to current workers. It does not grandfather in current workers but ensures the same overtime protections to all workers in a job classification.

Mr. Speaker, there is general agreement that workers are going to lose overtime protection under the administration's revised regulation. The question is how many will lose that protection? By some estimates as many as 8 million workers who are currently protected will lose that protection. Even if the Department of Labor concedes that a minimum of 644,000 workers currently covered would lose that protection and could be forced to work overtime without being compensated. Whether the number is 644,000 or 8 million, Mr. Speaker, the Bush administration should not put American workers in the position of being forced to work more than 40 hours a week without being paid overtime.

So to reiterate, the Senate provision would simply stop the Department of Labor from issuing a regulation taking away overtime protections from workers who currently have them. The Senate provision is absolutely essential to protect workers' overtime rights. It is not enough that more than 3 million workers have lost their jobs since this administration has taken office. Now the administration apparently wants to cut the pay of a number of workers who still have jobs by cutting their overtime protections. That is clearly not right. It is not fair. I do not think that the public would support it, and I would urge a yes vote on the motion to instruct.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe one thing that I just heard. The distinguished gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula) I believe said that if this were to be included in the conference report, the White House would veto the bill. I really want to see whether this President has the unmitigated gall to veto this bill because of protections that we place in the bill so that workers do not have to work more than 40 hours a week and still not be paid overtime. I want to see whether the President who has presided over the loss of 3 million jobs in this economy has the unmitigated gaul to then say to those workers, ``Sorry, folks, you've got to work more than 40 hours without collecting overtime.

Now, I believe, given his track record, he would like to do that, but very frankly, I doubt that he has got the moxie to do that in the teeth of the miserable economic performance that he has provided this country on the economic front. It is outrageous to even think that the President would veto this bill over this provision.

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

Mr. Speaker, I assume that came out of the gentleman's time?

Mr. Speaker, I was not asking that.

Mr. Speaker, I have parliamentary inquiry. I was just trying to determine whether the gentleman's last remarks came out of his time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.

I want to make clear this instruction motion does not prevent the Labor Department substituting the change in regulations that allow additional workers to claim overtime, so that is included in our motion. The only thing we stop is, we stop the President from unilaterally taking away overtime from workers who get it now.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Georgia always gives a fine speech on the floor. The problem is he just gave a fine speech against a proposition that is not being offered.

The fact is that the motion that we are offering today does, I repeat does, D-O-E-S, does allow the Labor Department regulations that add people to overtime protection. We do accept those updated definitions. What we do not accept is the President unilaterally, without congressional action, knocking off from the overtime protection rolls workers who now have that protection.

The gentleman also says not a single union member will be affected by the Labor Department's suggested rulings. Let me point out two things. First of all, we ought to be worried about all workers, not just union workers; and, secondly, the fact is that right now unions do not have to negotiate this overtime provision in their contracts. Right now they have the protection of the law. If this is removed, then that is just another way that you are going to unbalance the bargaining table against workers by forcing them to have to go back and negotiate something which they have had by right since 1938. I dare the administration to go into any union hall in this country or any working plant in this country and claim to be a friend of workers if they veto this bill over our efforts to stop that kind of unilateral action.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Lynch).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.

I will simply repeat again, the effect of this motion does not deny the Labor

Department the right to add a single worker to overtime protections that they provide under their adjustments. All it does is to prevent, to prevent workers who now have that overtime protection from losing it. It is just that simple.

I am the author of the motion. I think I know what it says. I think I know what it means.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Boswell).

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bell).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Linda T. Sanchez).

Mr. Speaker, how much time do we have?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller).

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

Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, is the transcript that is being taken of today's proceedings in English or is it in some other language?

I thank the Chair for that clarification.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to make sure that was the case because despite the comments of the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula), under our proposal that we are offering today, any worker who is added to the overtime protection rules by the new proposed rule is, by our motion, allowed to get that overtime protection. The only effect of our motion is to prevent the Department of Labor from knocking people off the overtime protection rules.

I have said it for the fourth time. I think I said it in English. I think the meaning is clear.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hooley).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 20 seconds.

Again, that was a nice speech, but it was prepared against a proposition that is not before us. The proposition before us does allow the modernization of the law.

There, I have said it. I have said it five times in a row. It would be nice if someone heard it and paid attention. Otherwise we might as well adjourn because we are talking past each other.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Despite the hyperventilation we have just heard, the fact is that there will be up to 8 million workers hurt unless this motion is passed.

No, I will not. The gentleman has had his time to bloviate. This is my time.

As I was saying, Mr. Speaker, the issue is very simple. Are you going to protect the up to 8 million workers who will be knocked out of protection for overtime if this motion does not pass? That is the only issue before us, despite all the other claims to the contrary. In a few short moments, we will see who cares about workers and who does not.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the minority leader.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 14 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, this continuing resolution will, I assume, be known as the Halloween appropriation bill for the year 2003, because what it does is to extend government activities until October 31 of this coming year. I am looking around the floor, looking for the

chickens, and I do not see any. And I am a little confused by that, because this is the day that the chickens come home to roost. I guess they are invisible, much like much of the truth is in the budget resolution that passed earlier this year. But I think we need to understand how we got to this situation today.

As of today, even though we are supposed to have all 13 appropriation bills passed by October 1, plus any supplementals for that fiscal year, despite that fact, this House has passed only three of the 13 conference reports that it would have to pass on appropriation bills in order to do its work. Now, that is not the fault of the Committee on Appropriations; it certainly is not the fault of the gentleman from Florida. The problem is that we have a budget process which has been stood on its head.

The idea behind the original budget resolution was that it was supposed to force all of the players in the Congress to face reality. Instead, it has been used increasingly each year by the House Republican leadership to assist the House in avoiding reality and ignoring reality.

What happens is this: the budget resolution for the year is produced by a committee that has absolutely no responsibility to implement it. The Committee on the Budget produces unreal numbers; they produce numbers that pretend that this Congress will spend less money than will actually wind up being spent on discretionary appropriations. It pretends in the budget resolution, as it did in April, that budget resolution pretended that we were going to meet the goals that many moderate Republicans had in this House for special education and for the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance. And then as soon as the budget resolution was passed, then the Committee on Appropriations is given the responsibility to deliver reality. And because the majority did not provide sufficient room in the budget resolution for this House to meet the promises that were laid out in the Republican budget resolution, then the Committee on Appropriations is stuck with the job of being the bad guy messenger.

So then poor Ralph Regula, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, has to come to the floor and say, ``Sorry, boys and girls, we do not have enough room in the resolution to do what we promised we would do just 3 weeks ago.'' So we cannot fund special education the way we were going to fund it, and we cannot keep our promises on title I or the No Child Left Behind Act, and the list goes on and on and on.

So because that budget resolution starts out with an unrealistic set of numbers, then the next 6 months the House and the other body try to get a double hernia trying to lift enough weight in order to get and pack all of these obligations into a tiny overall budget ceiling bag, and they cannot do it because they cannot repeal the basic laws of mathematics.

So now we are here with only three of the 13 appropriation bills passed. Last year when this happened, our friends on the majority side of the aisle blamed the other body because it was under Democratic control. Well, this year that is not the case. This year the Republican Party has all the marbles. They run the House, they run the Senate, they run the White House, and on good days, they even run the Supreme Court. And now what happened is that they do not have anybody to blame anymore. And the fact is, right now the majority Republican Party is having a fight with itself and it cannot win the debate. So it is stuck.

And so the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), who has done his job, I mean the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) has been a loyal soldier, followed his marching orders, even though the orders produced turkey results. He is a good, loyal soldier, and he has followed them; and so now he has to come to the floor and say, ``Folks, guess what, because the budget resolution was not real, we have not been able to move these bills forward, and so we are stuck way behind on the calendar.'' And that is not the whole story.

In addition, yesterday we had a hearing on the supplemental for Iraq. Now, we were told in March of this year by the wizard who ran OMB for the past 2 years, Mitch Daniels, we were told by the resident wizard over there that Iraq was only going to cost the $60 billion that the White House had already asked for in their first appropriation and there would not be any more need for money for Iraq for this year. They were only off by $87 billion. So now we have got to come in and pass a supplemental, even though the witnesses yesterday did not have a clue, or at least they would not tell us if they did, about what it was going to cost us over the next 5 years to carry out, not our program, but their program in Iraq.

So, very frankly, this Congress has no budget process at this point. The truth is revealed to us on the installment plan by the administration in terms of the cost of the effort for Iraq, and the truth is obscured as far as the domestic budget is concerned in order to maintain the fiction that, even though we have conducted a unilateral war, we can afford to continue to provide $88,000 tax cuts to millionaires in this country, and that is the biggest fiction of all.

So this bill is here trying to put a reality patch on an Alice in Wonderland fairy tale which is what the budget resolution has been. And so I do not blame the press for not covering it. This is too absurd a story to cover, and so we are left here facing inevitability; and we have no choice but to pass this resolution today.

Now, I would like to think that we would see a new sense of reality in the coming months, but I do not think so; and I go back to the conversation that I had years ago with Dick Bolling who served in this House, very distinguished career, and who wrote the Budget Act under which the budget resolution comes to the floor every year. Dick Bolling told me the night before he finalized his recommendations that he had one hard choice to make. He said, ``I do not know whether we should set up the Committee on the Budget so that people who are on the Committee on the Budget are people who represent the power centers in this institution, like the Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on Ways and Means and the other committees with direct spending authority. I do not know whether we ought to require that it be made up of people like that or whether we ought to require that it be made up of independent players appointed by the caucuses without respect to what committees they serve on.'' He decided to do the latter. But when he did, he said, ``If the party leaders do not take this process seriously and if they do not use it to force reality, then,'' he said, ``I will have made a bad mistake. ''

And in fact, I think what has happened is that the majority party leadership has decided to use the budget process, not as an instrument to force Members of Congress to make hard choices but, rather, as an instrument that facilitates the pretense that we can have it all. And so we pretend that we can provide $3 trillion-plus in tax cuts, even though we no longer have the surpluses that we had, that we were expecting when those tax cuts were passed.

We pretend we can fight a war in Iraq and charge every single dime to our grandchildren, and we pretend that that war will not have a consequence in terms of denied opportunities for kids to get a decent education and denied opportunities for people without health care to get some coverage. We pretend there are no consequences to the free- lunch budget that this place has passed. Well, there are in the real world, outside of this Chamber. And in this Chamber, probably the least consequential consequence is that we get stuck with having to pass a

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, the gentleman indicated that the budget resolution required a great degree of creativity. I would like to explain to the House what one of those creative measures has been.

Last year, in order to pretend that the budget resolution provided adequate funding for education, the committee provided what was known as ``advance funding'' for education to the tune of $2.2 billion. That meant that, for Enron accounting purposes, that $2.2 billion, which was appropriated last year, was not going to count until the next fiscal year, 2004; but now, guess what. Now we are at the end of fiscal 2003. So nobody is watching what happens to the deficit for 2003 anymore. So what happens instead is that now we get a double reverse because this proposal, this resolution today contains a gimmick that can only be labeled ``Enron accounting 1A'' because what this resolution does now is to move that $2.2 billion back to fiscal 2003.

So you have to play the shell game when they are looking at what happened in 2003, slip the money into the fiscal 2004 budget, and then when people take their eyes off 2003 and now focus on 2004, then you slip the same money into 2003. Great gimmick. It technically works, but if the SEC were supervising this, I think they would have the same kind of questions about our bookkeeping that we have had about Enron.

So that is just one of the creative accounting measures that the committee has been reduced to following. I see the gentleman smiling. He knows what I am talking about.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 7 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Florida and I are personal friends. And I take some pride in the fact that although this institution has become incredibly political over the last 15 years, and although it has become incredibly partisan, I take some pride in the fact that our friendship has withstood the context in which that friendship operates every day. I think, frankly, that the unreal demands on the part of the power centers in this institution have put greater strains on our friendship than is the case with any other chair and ranking member in the House, and yet we remain good friends. Because I know that the gentleman is trying to do his duty, and I think he understands that I am trying to do mine, and I think we genuinely like each other and respect each other.

But he is given the job of bringing some of the saddest pieces of legislation to this floor of anyone in the House, simply because he is denied the resources to meet our responsibilities to the citizens we represent. We had $6 trillion in surpluses when the majority party 2 years ago started passing out its tax cuts. We are now facing $2 trillion to $3 trillion in deficits over that same time frame. And on top of that, we are going to have to pay for Iraq, which will add a whole lot more than the $87 billion that we have been told about so far.

And so in a rational world, one would think that when conditions change to that degree, assumptions would also change and conduct would change, and we might reconsider some of our past decisions. But that is evidently not going to occur, so we are still going to continue to pretend that we can afford these huge tax cuts that have been passed out to high-income people in this country.

This Congress faces a very simple choice: What kind of country do we want America to be? Are we satisfied with the prospect of having a country which in 10 years will have 50 million people without health insurance, rather than 40? Are we satisfied with the pretensions that we provide equal opportunity for education, when in fact we do not? Are we satisfied with the meager enforcement that protects private pension systems and that protects and enforces honest accounting by corporations so that investors can know what the rules of the game really are? Are we satisfied facing the long-term shortfalls that will occur in Social Security?

I am not satisfied with that prospect, and I do not think most Members of this institution are either. If that is the case, we need to act like it, and we need to have a reconsideration of what the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) correctly calls the most colossally, fiscally irresponsible actions on the part of any administration certainly in my lifetime.

Mr. Speaker, having said that, I would simply urge Members for the time being to support this continuing resolution to give the Committee on Appropriations more time to perform its impossible responsibilities, and in hopes that eventually the majority leadership of this House will see the necessity to reconsider some of its most reckless fiscal actions.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Kentucky, the chairman of the subcommittee, indicated that this bill needed ``sensible'' amounts of money. I would say that I would agree with that, except for one thing: terrorists are not ``sensible,'' and that means that we may have to spend more money than we would like to spend in order to stop nonsensible people from terrorizing the world.

I think we need to understand exactly what this bill does, cutting through the rhetoric. This homeland security conference bill is 2.3 percent above last year's legislation. That does not even equal inflation. When the President addressed the Nation on September 7, he said, ``We will do what is necessary, we will spend what is necessary to achieve this essential victory in the war on terror to protect freedom and to make our own Nation more secure.''

Regrettably, Mr. Speaker, this conference report before us today does not live up to that promise made by the President just 2 weeks ago and neither do some of the President's actions. Let me give a few examples.

First, the conference report provides no funding to improve security at the perimeters or backsides of the airports.

Secondly, the conference report does not provide sufficient funding to secure ports in anything less than 20 years. Only $125 million is provided to port security grants in the conference report.

Third, this conference report does not increase funding for first responders above that provided in the previous year.

Fourth, the conference report does not provide sufficient funding to screen all cargo carried on passenger aircraft in anything close to a year. And with all due respect, the proposed conference report provides $85 million for cargo security conference. TSA Administrator Loy said he may need as much as $500 million to implement a cargo screen program.

Fifth, the conference report provides no funding for Customs to substantially increase the checking of cargo entering through our ports for weapons of mass destruction. GAO has said that the current low inspection rate makes container shipments a prime target for terrorists. Also, the screening requirement carried in the House bill for cargo carried on passenger aircraft has been weakened in the proposed conference to such an extent that it has no real meaning despite efforts of several speakers today to try to imply that something meaningful was done on this issue.

I support the gentleman from Minnesota's (Mr. Sabo) pending recommittal motion because I think it is in the interest of national security to pass it.

I would also make one other observation. Words are funny things. They can be used either to clarify or obscure. The subcommittee chairman indicated in a ``Dear Colleague'' letter and again made reference on the floor today to the large amounts of money that we are supposedly spending for homeland security. He suggests, for instance, that we spent more than $75 billion since September 11. That masks the true fact that that assessment includes all of the base funding that existed before 9/11. If you are looking at the additional funding that we have provided since that time, that figure would be $33 billion, not $75 billion.

Secondly, it is not true that we provided $29 billion in additional homeland security efforts in 2004. If you subtract the base from that figure, the real figure is more like $18 billion additional funding. That is a lot of money, but given the threat, in my judgment, it is not enough.

It has also been suggested that Congress will provide an additional $8.4 billion for border and port security in 2004. Again, that figure includes the base funding that existed prior to 9/11. That is not going to help much to deal with the increased threat.

And then we are told by the chairman very often that we could spend every single dollar of the Federal budget and some of us would argue we were not spending enough. I would strongly dispute that, and I would simply ask why should we be spending more in Iraq on a per capita basis than we are spending here at home to defend our homeland from threats such as cross-border threats?

I would urge support for the Sabo recommittal motion. I think that we need every dollar contained in that motion if we are to provide adequate security to this country.

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

Mr. Speaker, I think the public has a right to ask the Congress why it sometimes ignores the obvious. This bill today, despite all of the good words said about it, in one respect ignores the obvious. When we passed the conference report on the supplemental, I said I did not believe that it provided sufficient funds for disaster relief, since we knew that Hurricane Isabel was then about to arrive. Well, as we now know, it arrived; and now we know the extent of the damage of Isabel, even though we do not know the precise costs.

Mr. Speaker, 34 people lost their lives; flooding and wind damage was widespread. Many people in the hundreds of thousands still do not have electricity. FEMA tells us that a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the cost of Isabel is about 700 million bucks, the cost of Hurricane Fran and Floyd. Yesterday, the Richmond Times Dispatch reported that one official said, ``Too many times Federal, State, and local officials have acted or reacted on the basis of poor information, while FEMA is worried about keeping the headlines down rather than fixing the situation.''

Today it seems to me that we have both the unique opportunity and a unique obligation. Given the funding level for disaster relief of $1.5 billion that was included in the Senate bill to provide funding for Isabel and to help fix the situation, if we wait for the President to submit a supplemental request, it is likely that we will be in the situation next spring where FEMA is out of money, there is a crisis at hand, and people will once again say, well, what in God's Earth? Did those guys think they knew what they were doing? Why did not they anticipate this? Why did they not take care of it when they knew the problem was at hand?

In my view, we need action, not reaction. That is why we ought to support the Moran motion. We know this damage has occurred. We know the Federal Government is going to be getting the bill. We should not be hiding the cost today, as we are hiding the costs of so many other items. We should fess up and face up to the problem and deal with it now, not after the fact next spring when it can get in the way of orderly relief when we have more problems.

Mr. Speaker, it is appropriate that we appoint conferees and begin the conference on this, the day before September 11, as the gentleman from Minnesota has indicated. It is not appropriate, however, that we will be considering a conference bill in which the budget allocation of the House and Senate equals only $29.4 billion, a mere 2.3 percent above today's funding. That does not even equal inflation.

The House and the Senate bills are, in this case, a bit different. The House bill provides more funding for first responders. The Senate bill provides more funding to secure our northern border, as the gentleman has indicated, for airport security and for Disaster Relief. All of that is needed, plus more.

The House bill also includes the amendment offered by the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) to require that cargo carried on passenger aircraft is screened. This is the right thing to do. Today no cargo is screened. According to a TSA public statement there is a 35 to 65 percent likelihood that terrorists are planning to put a bomb in cargo on a passenger plane. But even if we were to do all of the things required and funded in the House and Senate bills, we will still leave many homeland security problems to deal with for another day.

Neither the House nor the Senate bill provides any funding to improve security at the perimeters or backsides of our airports. The ability to easily penetrate those backsides of our airports has been demonstrated on numerous occasions, most recently in New York, where fishermen lost due to a storm came ashore on the back side of JFK Airport and no one spotted them.

Neither the House nor the Senate bill provides sufficient funding to secure our ports by implementing the port security plans required under the Maritime Transportation Security Act in anything less than 20 years. Neither the House nor the Senate bill provides funding to fully implement the Markey amendment. Neither the House nor the Senate bill provides funding for Customs to substantially increase the checking of cargo entering through our ports for weapons of mass destruction.

The GAO has said that the current low inspection rate makes container shipments a prime target for terrorists. So I support the motion to instruct, because it is the only motion that we can offer under House rules which makes sense.

I do not support the majority party budget system that has gotten us to this ridiculous situation under which it is apparently fine to move quickly on an $87 billion supplemental package for Iraq, but not fine to add a small percentage of this amount to better secure our homeland, our ports, our borders and our airports.

What kind of security do we have, when an individual could recently ship himself in a container from New York to another location in this country and not be detected, even though you had a human being inside the cargo box? I mean, how secure are we when that can happen? We have a long way to go before we meet the promises that so many of us made after 9/11.

The President told the country 2 days ago that 9/11 had taught him that we need to provide whatever is necessary for the security of the country. That being the case, I wish that he would accept some of the increases that we have asked for for more than a year-and-a-half on a bipartisan basis in this House. I wish that we did not have a President who was vetoing more than $1.5 billion of homeland security items that were passed in a bill that had 90 percent support of Republicans and Democrats alike in both the House and the other body. I wish we could get together on these items, which are clearly essential to the safety of our public and to the strength of this country at home.

I would urge Members to support the motion to recommit. It is the very least that we can do under these circumstances to secure the home front while we are obliterating the budget surplus by what we spend abroad to do the same thing.

Mr. Speaker, I think the message here is simple: If Members think that our ports are safe enough, our borders are safe enough, our airlines are safe enough, then by all means, vote against this motion. But if you recognize that they are not, then you ought to vote for it.

But I would have one cautionary note. I would say to my friends on the majority side of the aisle, please do not vote for this motion if you then intend to scuttle the Markey amendment in conference. If that were to happen, it would be tantamount to deceiving the public and trying to have it both ways.

If you voted for this motion, stick to it in conference or else everything that we have tried to do today will be as phony as a $3 bill.

Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, could I inquire if anyone from the attending physician is present? I understand someone's arm is being broken.

So the amendment was agreed to.

The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.