Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, did the Clerk read two or three amendments to be potentially offered by the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters)?

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word, and I yield to the gentleman from Florida for a time request.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Reserving the right to object, as I said earlier, we have over 40 amendments left to go. I understand this is an important amendment. We just had over an hour on an amendment from the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) that was considered important. If we provide 40 minutes' time for this amendment, I do not want the expectation to be that we will do that for every other amendment. I would hope that we understand that this is the last amendment we would ask significant time for, and Members can expect us to ask unanimous consent in order to hold each future amendment to considerably less time than this.

I thank the gentleman.

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

Mr. Chairman, in light of the recent colloquy, let me simply say that I am getting whiplash from trying to follow the lead of the majority party and the White House on the issue that was just under discussion.

We had before us earlier in the week this bill to essentially pay for the first downpayment on the Iraq war. We were trying to get additional money in the bill for homeland security so that we could protect ourselves at home from the retaliation that was likely to come from that involvement in the war.

The House Republican leadership would not see its way fit to allow us to even debate that amendment and come to a vote on the House floor; and yet they arbitrarily ordered the Committee on Appropriations to include the $3.5 billion bailout for the airline industry that was just discussed a moment ago. Then, after that happened, then the White House issued a statement saying that, in fact, the package before the House for airline bailout was too generous.

I am having a little difficulty following the lead of the majority and the lead of the White House because they seem to be working at cross purposes, and I am further confounded by the fact that this House is willing to consider a huge expenditure of funds like this with no hearings and to have it dealt with by a committee that has no special understanding of the problem; and it seems to me that a much better way, well, it just seems to me that we ought to be asking a fundamental question.

It seems to me we ought to be asking the question of whether or not we have a viable airline industry in this country. In my view, we have a bunch of let's-pretend capitalists who have to come to the government for a bailout every time something happens in the economy.

Now, they are essential to our national welfare and to our economic well-being. So I think we obviously need to keep the airline industry functioning, but I do not know how many times an airline has to go bankrupt before it is bankrupt. I do not know how many times they have to come to the taxpayers for additional money before we decide that a better way is to simply regulate them as a necessary public utility or as a public utility providing necessary service to the country, and that is what I really believe in the long term we ought to do.

But I also must protest the slap dash way that this issue has wound up on the appropriation bill because I find it quaint that the House Republican leadership would demand the House go one way while the White House seems to indicate it wants to go another way. It is pretty hard to follow that kind of leadership, and I admire the gentleman from Florida for being a good soldier and responding to the instructions of his leadership; but I would have a difficult time trying to explain this to any taxpayer, any of my constituents.

I would just hope that in the future we can do a better job of managing a problem like this, and I wish we could get to discuss the fundamentals on this issue rather than simply throwing more money at the problem.

We were told that we cannot throw more money at homeland security, and yet we are providing billions of dollars to the airline industry without doing one whit to help the employees of those same airlines.

I find that quaint. It is always the corporate part of the industry that gets the attention of Congress; and the working stiff sort of gets left in the caboose, if I can change transportation modes.

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

Mr. Chairman, I would like to simply point out to the House that there are still, as near as I can count, 14 amendments remaining. If we are going to debate 14 amendments, Members can calculate for themselves how long we will be here.

That is all I have to say.

Amendment Offered by Mr. Rothman

Reserving the right to object, Mr. Chairman, I know that there are a number of people on this side of the aisle who want to participate in debate on this amendment. So I would ask whether the time arrangements could be adjusted so we would be guaranteed some time on this side of the aisle.

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, if you follow the logic of the last speaker, what you are saying is that we should provide in this bill $3.25 billion to the airline industry,

which we do not owe, but that we should not provide the funds in the bill to reimburse the volunteers for services, for which we do owe. I find that that makes no sense whatsoever.

The gentleman from New York (Mr. Walsh) is absolutely right. This is an obligation which government has. We should not blame the recipients, we should not blame the participants in this program for the screw-ups of the agency on their bookkeeping balances.

The fact is that this is totally defensible at a time when we are trying to encourage volunteerism, at a time when we are trying to encourage a sense of self-sacrifice. It would be a strange message indeed to say that we are not going to meet our obligations to the volunteers under this program.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield my remaining time to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller).

Mr. Chairman, I am told that I am asking permission to strike the last word.

I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, let me simply say that I appreciate the gentleman's comments and would simply say this. I share the wonder that we can be in the process of planning to provide universal health care in Iraq and provide a lot of education reconstruction as well.

I guess my view of it is this. If we are going to be bombing the devil out of a country, I suspect that we have a considerable moral obligation to the population afterwards to help repair the damage and to help repair the human misery. So I do not begrudge what we will be trying to do for the people of Iraq after this miserable war.

What I do hope, however, is that we will be able to reduce and perhaps eliminate future tax cuts that are contemplated right now here at home so that we can in fact provide universal health care for the people at home; so that we can in fact provide some school construction in our own districts; and so that we can in fact modernize hospitals in our own country. I think that is the proper way to do it, and I appreciate the gentleman's comments.

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

Mr. Chairman, we have been told all day numerous times that we could not afford to provide the funding that we wanted for homeland security; yet the leadership of this House has insisted that we include over $3 billion in ``relief'' for the airlines. I just thought the body would be interested in this article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I want to read the first three paragraphs:

``A group of 30 retired Delta Airline executives told current management last winter that spending millions of dollars to insulate top executive pensions from potential bankruptcy claims was `morally wrong' and `unconscionable.'

``The group, which included two former No. 2 executives at the Atlanta company, also warned the move would hurt Delta's reputation, as well as its ability to seek Federal aid and uphold employee morale.

``Their warning came in a January 22 letter to Delta Chairman and Chief Executive Leo Mullin.''

Some of the retired executives decided to make the letter public after last week's formal disclosure by Delta that it spent $25.5 million in 2002 to start creating protected pension trusts for Mullin and 32 other top executives.

Now, if this is not a spectacular idea or example of rip-off capitalism, I do not know what is. This is enough to give capitalism a bad name.

Mr. Chairman, I would just suggest that before we are so anxious to provide the funding that the Republican leadership in this House insists that we provide to these companies, I would suggest that Members recognize that the story tells us that there ought to be a few more stringent conditions on the use of that money by those airlines.

This kind of conduct is outrageous. It is an example of why 50 percent of

Americans do not vote, because they do not think that their elected representatives will protect the interests of working people nearly as eagerly as they will protect the interests of the corporate elite of this country. Delta Airlines management should be ashamed of itself, and anybody who comes into a congressional office looking for a bailout after they are trying to protect these kinds of pensions should be thrown bodily out of congressional offices.

Amendment No. 11 Offered by Mr. Nethercutt

Mr. Chairman, I reserve a point of order on the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, I was having difficulty hearing here. The chairman is indicating that 15 minutes would be reserved for the gentleman from Washington, 5 minutes for the gentleman from Florida, and 10 minutes for yours truly? Is the gentleman opposed to the amendment?

Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Chairman, I object.

Mr. Chairman, I make a point of order against the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, it is in violation of clause 2, rule XXII.

Mr. Chairman, the minority has been told all day and all evening that we had to abide by the rules, even though the rule waived points of order against the majority bill. Now we have a situation where a majority Member chooses to try to substitute another amendment for the amendment that was presented by the Clerk. I am sorry, but if we are going to stick by the rules, I am sticking by the rules, and I make a point of order against the amendment.

Reserving the right to object, Mr. Chairman, could I suggest that the gentleman, since it is late and we do have other amendments to dispose of, how much did the gentleman suggest in time?

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Could I suggest that we cut it to 20?

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

Mr. Chairman, we used to have a Member of this body by the name of Jimmy Burke, and Jimmy Burke said once to the freshman class incoming, he said, oh, I understand your problem; you think this place is on the level. Well, I want to tell you that does not matter what you do on this amendment. This amendment ain't on the level. This amendment is consumer fraud masquerading as legislation, and it ain't going to do nothing to nobody and let me tell you why.

If you look at the language carefully, the language purports to send the message that what we are doing is, oh, oh,

look at the muscles. We are telling those Frenchies and those German companies, you cannot participate; but if you look at the actual language, the language allows those companies to get around this limitation by doing the same thing that corporate expatriates have done in this country by simply setting up a mailing address in Bermuda or any other offshore place.

So it is what I call a holy picture amendment. The politicians pause for holy pictures, boy, we really did something. But you have got language that does not do nothing to nobody.

This language has absolutely no effect whatsoever except that it makes the job of the White House and the State Department more difficult, which is I assume why we have the letter from the State Department which says that such an amendment would jeopardize the type of support we are attempting to build within the United Nations, support which aims to unite the international community in a forward- looking effort to build a better future for the people of Iraq.

Now, if we were wise, and I know that is beyond reasonable expectations often in a legislative body, but if we were wise, what we would, in fact, be doing is looking at tomorrow rather than yesterday.

We are going to, whether we like it or not, need to rebuild the alliances which have been temporarily shaken by our divisions in this war. We are going to have to rebuild the United Nations and rebuild NATO so that we are more unified in dealing with postwar Iraq and the rest of the world; and we are going to have to overcome the fact that because of divisions we have right now, pro-U.S. responses in public opinion polls throughout Europe have dropped by about 20 percent.

Now, to me, the way that we overcome that, the way we overcome the world's cynicism is by demonstrating traditional American magnanimity, which is what we did in the Marshall Plan and what we have done so many times in our country's history.

So I would simply say, Mr. Chairman, who am I to stand in the way, if majority party members want to make life a little more difficult for a Republican administration?

Now, I stand here, I hope as a patriot; and I believe that this amendment does cause the administration additional problems. I am so proud of the chairman of this committee because this committee produced legislation which guaranteed that the executive branch could not cross the line and trample on legislative prerogatives, and I congratulate and I honor the chairman for having the guts to do that.

But we also, we also as legislators from time to time have to restrain ourselves and recognize that sometimes we do the Nation no good when we impinge upon executive branch prerogatives, as this amendment I believe does.

So I am standing here as a Republican who has a minimum of, as the Democrat, as my friends know, I started out life as a Republican but then when I learned to read I switched parties.

But let me simply say, I stand here, I hope, as a patriot, and I think that this is one place where George Bush needs some running room. If you do not have enough confidence in him to let him make the right choice, then by all means vote for this amendment; but you know, it does not do nothing to nobody except enable politicians to pose for political holy pictures. What is new around here?

Mr. Speaker, a good man has died after spending 20 years completely paralyzed because of mindless violence perpetrated by the Abu Nidal Middle East terrorist faction. Shlomo Argov, the former Israeli Ambassador to Britain, who died on February 23 in a Jerusalem hospital, was shot as he emerged from a meeting in a London hotel in 1982. For more than 20 years he was a living example of the tragedy that has befallen so many decent people because of mindless hatred that is used to justify terrorist acts.

I first met him when he showed me around Jerusalem on my first visit to the Middle East after the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. He was a political moderate who in his conversations with me spoke articulately of the need for Israelis and Palestinians to come to an understanding about their differences, and, yet, he was gunned down by forces of hatred who have always been anxious to make a political point regardless of the injury done to other human beings or to their own cause.

Before he was so viciously assaulted, he had a distinguished career in Israeli's Minister of Foreign Affairs and served as Ambassador to Mexico, the Netherlands, and finally, Ambassador to Britain. His death is another demonstration of how close the Middle East is to running out of men of good will before it runs out of hatred.

Mr. Argov paid a terrible price for trying to bring his talents to bear to advance the well being of the part of the world from which he came. His death should not go unnoticed. Neither should the distinguished service that he provided to Israel and the world before his life was so cruelly changed by mindless Palestinian militants.

Thoughtful people in both Israeli and Palestinian circles should view his death as another reminder of the need to end the terror, cut through the hatred, and give innocent civilians in that region an opportunity for the kind of

happy and decent life which was denied to Shlomo Argov.

I'm sure the sympathies of all of us who knew him go out to his family. I am inserting a copy of Mr. Argov's obituary that appeared in the Washington Post.

[From the Washington Post, Feb. 24, 2003]

Israeli Diplomat Shlomo Argov Dies

Jerusalem.--Shlomo Argov, 73, the former Israeli ambassador

to Britain who was paralyzed during an assassination attempt

by Palestinian militants that triggered Israel's invasion of

Lebanon in 1982, died Feb. 23.

He has been in Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital since the

shooting. Hospital officials said he died from complication

from wounds that left him completely paralyzed and on life-

support machines.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced at the start

of Sunday's weekly Gabinet meeting that ``this morning,

before dawn, Ambassador Shlomo Argov died.''

Gunmen from the Abu Nidal guerrilla faction, which has ties

to Libya, Syria and Iraq, shot Mr. Argov after a diplomatic

meeting outside London's Dorchester Hotel. Three Abu Nidal

members were convicted in the shooting.

The shooting was Israel's stated pretext for invading

Lebanon four days later and laying siege to Beirut for three

months until Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his fighter

were forced out of the country. The invasion also marked the

start of an 18-year Israeli military presence in south

Lebanon, which ended with Israel's withdrawal in May 2000.

Reuven Merhaz, a former colleague of Mr. Argov, said

Sharon, who was defined minister at the time, had planned the

Lebanon invasion, well before Argov was shot.

``The war plan was ready,'' Merhav told Israel Radio on

Sunday. ``He [Sharon] made no secret of it. He had presented

the plan to the Americans some months earlier.''

Mr. Argov, who was born in Jerusalem, studied in Washington

and London and joined Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in

1959. He served as ambassador to Mexico and the Netherlands

before assuming his position as ambassador to Britain in

1979.

The Jerusalem Post described Mr. Argov as ``brilliant and

suave'' and ranked him with orator and historian Abba Eban,

Israel's first ambassador to the United Nations, who died in

November.

Victor Harel, a deputy director general at the Israeli

Foreign Minister, said that at the time of the shooting. Mr.

Argov was in his physical and intellectual prime, jogging

every day and conversing in fluent English and Spanish in

addition to his native Hebrew.

While he remained lucid after the shooting, he was

emotionally devastated by the awareness of his disability,

Harel told the radio.

``He was fully conscious for the first two or three

years.'' he said ``But he couldn't do anything on his own.

The paralysis was total. He also got more and more

medication, so visiting him became harder and harder.''

Mr. Argov's survivors include three children.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to recognize the outstanding efforts made by Ms. Jaclyn Sobocienski who is leaving the House Appropriations Committee this week.

Jaclyn is a native of New York. She is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Siena College, possessing a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and a Bachelor of Science degree in finance. That alone made her a natural for the Appropriations Committee. She served as an intern in the New York State Assembly, and also worked for the New York Mets during summers between school years. On those few occasions where we gave her some time off, Jaclyn was active in dance, Italian language study, and travel.

She has been an administrative aide to the minority staff of the House Appropriations Committee since October 5, 2001. Just after she joined the Committee, the anthrax incident in the Longworth House Office Building occurred. Jaclyn not only was instrumental in getting our temporary alternate office up and running for the period that our Longworth office was closed, but also she reacted to the stress in a very professional and helpful manner that allowed the Members and the staff to get on with conducting the nation's business.

Jaclyn put in many long evenings in behalf of the Members of the Appropriations Committee, with direct support to the Democratic professional staff of the Committee. She tirelessly served as the liaison between the Committee and all Democratic House offices, the press, and the public. She succeeded in every task she was given.

I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank her for her outstanding efforts to me and to the Committee, and to wish her well in her new career. We will miss her, and wish her nothing but success and happiness.

Mr. Speaker, in the conduct of foreign affairs, every President deserves the benefit of the doubt.

I am standing here today in an empty Chamber because these special orders are simply the time in the House's schedule when after legislative business is concluded Members can gather or take the time to get something off their chest, and so I am here today to get something off my chest about the coming war with Iraq.

As I said, in the conduct of foreign affairs, I think every President deserves the benefit of the doubt, and on a number of occasions, I have worked with Presidents, regardless of party, on foreign policy issues. Sometimes I have honestly differed.

Iraq, in my view, is a close call. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a pathological thug. We have lived with and contained other sociopaths before. Example, Joseph Stalin, whose 50-year anniversary of his death we just celebrated yesterday. It is hard to believe he has been gone 50 years, but we did not attack the Soviet Union, even though Stalin was probably one of the two greatest sociopaths of all time, the other being Hitler.

We have also seen groups like the Khmer Rouge systematically butcher their own people, and certainly, the administration has not, in any way, demonstrated or tried to demonstrate that Saddam had anything to do with the attack of September 11.

But it may very well be that we need to remove him at some point, and that point may be soon. My purpose today is not to talk about that. My purpose is to talk about what condition America will be in both at home and abroad if we take on that task, because if we do it, we have an obligation to go after Saddam in a way that does not weaken our ability to lead the world in dealing with future challenges that will certainly confront us.

My concern is that this administration has demonstrated such shortsighted arrogance that they have made it more difficult for the United States to retain its leadership ability and to see that the U.S. has the support it needs in this coming endeavor.

Now, it is obvious that President Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz and a number of others in the administration have intended to attack Saddam since the moment they took office, but if that is so, you would think that the administration would have done anything that they could do in order to build allies for the coming effort, both at home and abroad. Instead, the administration has dealt with Congress and with the international community in a my way or else approach.

At home, after September 11, the Congress in total bipartisanship fashioned an initial $40 billion package to deal with the immediate response needs of the administration, but then when Members of the House and Senate attempted to talk to the administration about the need to do more to build up our homeland security efforts in our ports, on our borders, in our local communities. We were told, in essence, if you allocate or if you appropriate one dime more than I have asked for, I will veto it.

Again, in June, when Congress tried again to beef up our ability to protect communities and ports and other vulnerable areas from terrorist attack, the President vetoed more than a billion-and-a-half dollars in homeland security money that this House and the other body voted to provide by 90 percent margins of both political parties in both Chambers.

Now, that action by the White House, in vetoing those funds, raised doubts in Congress. Were we really willing to do everything necessary to baton down the hatches at home, to guard against retaliatory action if we are going to take on Saddam? The answer from the White House, given by its action on the veto of home security funds, was only partly.

Internationally, the signals were just as confusing. Now, I know the French do not need many excuses to go their own way in foreign affairs. They have demonstrated that from the time of Charles de Gaulle.

But look at the administration's conduct the last 2 years on four fronts. First, in the past 2 years, the administration has unilaterally announced its intention to, or its desire to blow up three international treaties: the nuclear test ban treaty, the antiballistic missile treaty, and the global warming treaty. Then after those actions, the administration professes surprise when the French and the Germans feel free to engage in a little unilateralism of their own. By example, it seems to me that, by example, the administration made it easy for France and Germany and others to go their own way because that is what we announced our free right and intention to do on those other treaties.

Second, the administration added to the unraveling of NATO and the weakening of the Security Council resolve by announcing twin doctrines of American unilateralism and preemption. Now, obviously, the United States and any other sovereign nation has the right to undertake a unilateral or preemptive act to defend its own people. Obviously. But to announce it and to trumpet it to the world as a new intellectual doctrine scared the bejabbers out of many countries and gave other countries an excuse to do the same thing.

Mr. Speaker, whatever happened to Teddy Roosevelt's advice, ``Speak softly and carry a big stick''? And it did not help that the administration's chest-beating on preemption came at the same time that our own officials were worried pea green about a preemptive military action that might be taken by either India or Pakistan during their escalated confrontation.

Third. The administration even let it be known that nuclear weapons were a possibility in Iraq under certain circumstances. That also added to the world's jitters. The net result of the administration's overblown rhetoric resulted in pro-American responses in public opinion polls in Europe declining by almost 20 percent. And all of that made it easier for the French and the German governments to question the Bush administration and its policy on Iraq. I think it would have been much harder for them to do so if the administration had not spent the last 2 years telling the rest of the world we were going to do everything our way or suffer the consequences.

And even if we, in the end, obtain the acquiescence of countries like Germany and France to proceed on Iraq, our past rhetoric will make it more difficult for the U.S. to have their support in the years ahead when we will be neck deep in a post-war Iraqi-American regency of dubious wisdom. So, in my view, in short, the administration, by its rhetoric, has written a textbook on how not to rally support on a controversial question.

Fourth. As a result of the unilateralist rhetoric, the administration has also raised the cost of this endeavor to U.S. taxpayers. President Bush's father was able to work the world by telephone, sort of in a dialing-for-dollars operation, in which he was able to convince other countries to pay their share for the cost of attacking Iraq in 1991. This President has brought a new wrinkle to diplomacy. He has offered to pay other countries for their share of the cost associated with this war. That really is an interesting wrinkle. Meanwhile, the administration has steadily hidden the potential range of costs and the duration of our occupation of Iraq from the American people.

Now, I have no doubt that we are going to war; and when we do, I, like every other Member of this body, will rally around the troops in the field, because they are doing their duty under the Commander in Chief and we have no choice and no desire to do anything but to support them. I know my daughter-in-law's brother is one of those patchy helicopter pilots who will be stuck with heavy duty over there. But, please, Mr. Speaker, spare us the rhetoric about how this operation is going to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy.

Mr. Speaker, I have heard such overblown rhetoric about how this action will unleash the forces of sweetness and democracy in Iraq, but I fully expect that the next thing we are going to hear is that we ought to replace New Hampshire with Iraq on the Presidential primary cycle.

Mr. Speaker, it is clear that the die is cast, and I am not going to continue to chew the same old argument. This House has already voted. But before this operation moves ahead, I want to express my dismay at the shortsighted and thoughtless manner in which the administration, through its careless and arrogant unilateralist rhetoric, has mishandled relations with the same NATO allies that we will need in the Security Council. And I would ask some of the same questions I asked on this floor before we went to war against Iraq in 1991. And I would say parenthetically that I was privileged to chair that debate for a considerable period of the time in which it occurred back then. But I want to ask some of the same questions I asked then.

Now, the administration clearly expects this war to go swiftly, and they expect it to go well. And they are probably right. I think they are, and I hope that they are. But my concern is what about afterwards. Do we really believe that we will not create thousands of new recruits for al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the Arab world? Do we really intend to continue the policy of benign neglect and drift that has characterized our policy toward the moribund peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians? How long will U.S. military presence be in the Middle East after the war is over, and how do we intend to handle that presence that we do not become a hated occupying power in a radicalized region of the world?

And I would ask this: While we are focusing on Iraq, is the administration, by default, going to acquiesce in North Korea's becoming a permanent member of the nuclear club? It appears from what we see in the papers that that is very likely on the part of the administration.

And then I would ask, bringing the issue closer to home, what are we going to do to protect our own economy from the cost of both this war and its 10-year aftermath? So far the administration's answer is we are going to go to war and so we need to cut your taxes.

Can you imagine President Teddy Roosevelt or President Woodrow Wilson or FDR or Harry Truman saying we are going to go to war and your country needs you to accept a tax cut? Should we really be saying, we are going to go to war and so you should have a tax cut and your kids should pay the bill, not just for the war but for the 10 years afterwards? We are already being asked to borrow money to pay for this war, and the scuttlebutt is that the minute the war begins we are going to get a bill from the administration, a request for about $100 billion. And Lord knows what it is going to cost in the next 10 years.

And my simple and last question would be: Should we, at the same time that we are borrowing money to pay for this war, should we also be borrowing money to take millionaires off the tax role, as the White House tax and budget request in fact is asking us to do? I would hope that the political leadership of this country would be more mature than that and more fair than that. I cannot believe that we are going to put this war on the cuff; that we are then going to proceed with tax action that will take another more than $1 trillion out of the Federal Treasury in the next few years and then go to the American people with a straight face and say we have strengthened the economy for the long term.

I think Americans expect to do their duty in a time of crisis, and I think Americans do not expect that while we are having several hundred thousand troops abroad prepare to make the ultimate sacrifice in defense of what the President has concluded is in our national interest, I do not believe that at a time when those soldiers are doing that, that the best we can do back home is to say to everyone on the home front, folks, you are going to have to sacrifice by taking a tax cut, even though it is going to load billions and billions of dollars of debt on future taxpayers, including the kids that we say this war is being fought to help protect.

So, Mr. Speaker, this country is going to war. It is obvious. But I would hope that the next time that we do so we have not ahead of time, as the administration has done, that we have not ahead of time looked for ways to antagonize the very allies that we are going to need in this case, like we need support in the Security Council today if we are to have unity in the world when we take on Saddam. I hope we learn from this experience that if you intend to ask the support of the world in a military endeavor of this nature that you do not spend the first 2 years saying, by the way, everything we are going to do in the world, we are going to do it our way or no way. I do not think that is an intelligent or a thoughtful way to run foreign policy. And I certainly do not think that adding over $1 trillion to our budget deficit and our national debt over the next few years is a way to run the economy at a time when we are contemplating going to war.

Mr. Speaker, I think everybody here remembers this fellow, President Reagan. He once stood before this body. This is a picture of him doing it. He pointed to an appropriations conference report and he said this: ``This is the conference report, a 1,053-page report weighing 14 pounds.'' Then he said, ``Congress should never send me another one of these.''

Do you know how much this thing weighs today? Do you know how much this weighs? This is over 3,000 pages, and it weighs over 32 pounds. Now, President Reagan was talking about how bad it was when he had a 14-pound document. This is 2\1/2\ times as big.

And then we have another outrage. I will get into the rest of the substance later, but I want to mention one thing especially. This bill, for first responders, this bill in terms of the aid we provide to firemen and policemen across the country, is $456 million below even President Bush's request. Does this House really want to vote to cut it that low?

Now we are being told that the answer to our security problems is duct tape and plastic sheeting.

With all due respect, rather than duct tape and plastic sheeting, I think our firemen would rather have more aid so they can buy the protective equipment that they need to protect their communities. That is just one of the shortcomings of this bill.

There is another provision in this bill that gives one chicken farm operation in Georgia the opportunity to put labels on their products calling them organic, even though they are not. There is another provision in this bill which gives 10 farmers in Texas $15 million in special benefits because they cannot quite qualify for a tax provision in the Tax Code. And then we have some other lollapalooza, which I will discuss a little bit later.

Now, my colleagues cannot convince me that those provisions would have survived if this bill had gone through the normal debate that normally accompanies appropriation bills. But 90 percent of the dollars, 90 percent of the dollars that we are going to spend as a result of this package have never been debated for one moment on the floor of the House of Representatives. All of the money that is in here is the result of a back-room deal. This is what ought to happen to back-room deals: we ought to leave them on the floor and go back to the drawing board.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 10 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot ask people to vote against their bill because it does some things which any piece of legislation would do which came to the floor at this point. It does provide needed funds for Medicare. It does provide funding for a number of programs which, if we did not pass the bill, would be limited to last year's level; and that would cripple a good number of programs, including education. But before Members decide how they want to vote, I think they need to understand that this legislation is a god-awful mess brought to the floor by a god-awful process.

About $360 billion, or 90 percent, of the $400 billion in spending contained in this bill, never came before the House of Representatives until it arrived in this one huge take-it-or-leave-it package today. That means 90 percent of the domestic budget involving hundreds of individual programs was never subjected to debate or amendment in the United States House of Representatives.

What you have here, as I said earlier, is the biggest back-room deal in terms of spending in the Nation's history. And when you have a back- room deal which is not ever aired in public, that means a lot of people are going to get hurt, and a lot of people are going to get things that they should not get. And I want to walk through some examples.

The most urgent need in this country is to ensure that we can track down and stop people who would commit acts of terror against our citizenry. This bill leaves huge gaps in our defenses. Once again, we are delaying the ability of funds that are required to protect American lives.

I would say to everyone who would listen that this is not the fault of our good friend, the chairman of the committee; he has done his duty, and he understands the need for action in this area. But there are many others in this Chamber and there are some on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue who are not being helpful and who are blocking the resources that are critically needed at the moment. This Nation is in serious peril and here are some examples:

The head of the Customs Service says we need to greatly beef up the inspections of cargo containers used in worldwide shipping. He and others have warned that these containers offer terrorists with significant opportunities to get bombs, chemicals, missiles and other dangerous weapons into this country. He has asked for $57 million right now to do that job, $57 million. This bill contains $12 million, less than 25 percent of what is needed. We have $392 million in spending for new courthouses in this bill, but the committee could not find the other $45 million to fully fund the container security initiative that was asked for by our own administration.

In addition to the containers themselves, we have huge security issues with respect to ports. We have ships arriving in this country every day containing millions of gallons of highly flammable and toxic chemicals. They are bombs waiting to be detonated. The Coast Guard says the costs of upgrading security at these ports is $1 billion. This bill contains only $150 million or 15 percent of the amount that ought to be in the bill.

Now, we have known since we saw the pictures of those brave police and fire fighters on September 11 that the next attack might put them in even more dangerous situations. Very few police departments have the equipment necessary to allow first responders to enter an area that has been hit by chemical, biological or radiological weapons. We have been trying to get that money out for more than a year, and we have hit roadblocks time after time after time.

The White House is playing a flim-flam game with respect to this issue. A year ago, the President blocked the inclusion of significant first responder funds in the supplemental. Last summer, he vetoed first responder funds in the second supplemental. He has also refused since last October to release the first responder funds made available by the continuing resolutions. But he spends a lot of time going around the country being photographed with firemen and policemen and talking about the $3.5 billion in funds for first responders in his 2003 budget.

He does not mention, however, where he got the bulk of the money to pay for that $3.5 billion increase. He got it by eliminating a series of ongoing programs that also provide grants to local policemen and firemen. That is like the boss offering to double your pay next month if you will agree to take no pay this month. It does not help a heck of a lot.

This bill restores those basic cuts, but it does so by slashing the President's first responder initiative. When all grants to fire and police are combined, this conference report is $466 million below the President's request for first responders. For the first time, Congress will have a worse record on first responders than the White House, and that is outrageous. So I guess the answer is, let them use duct tape.

There are deficiencies in other areas. The Department of Energy, the committee could not find $108 million identified last spring by the Army Corps of Engineers as being absolutely essential for physical security upgrades to waterway navigation and dams around the Nation. And none of the $254 million identified by the Secretary of Energy last spring as necessary to secure radioactive material, nuclear weapons and other highly toxic substances at U.S. nuclear weapons plants and laboratories is provided in this bill.

Education is a mixed bag. Now, for the last 6 years, on average, we have been able to provide about a 14 percent increase in education.

The good news in this bill is that we have been able in this bill to raise the funding for education above the real dollar freeze that the President presented, or 3 percent in nominal terms.

This bill is about $3 billion above the President's for education. It means that we will have about a 10 percent increase. That is still a cut in the rate of increase that we have had for education on average over the last 6 years, but it is some progress and I am pleased to see it; but it is still funded at such limited levels that we will be leaving an additional 628,000 children behind who would not have been left behind if we had funded this bill at the Senate levels.

We are also turning a blind eye to what is happening on college campuses. State and local budget crunches are hitting, and tuition is skyrocketing in some places by as much as 36 percent. This bill holds Pell grants to a 1\1/2\ percent increase over last year. That simply means college will not be affordable to tens of thousands of young people who want to better themselves by getting a college education.

We have an ugly product with respect to both homeland security and a mixed bag with respect to education. I save the worst for last.

This bill is sad with respect to both funding and legislative language that will damage the environment and damage our forests and wilderness areas. This bill is a wholesale attack on environmental protection. The interior section of this bill is one of the worst appropriation measures to come to the floor of this House in many years. The park service is cut by $110 million below the President's request. The committee has trampled on a commitment made by the Republican and Democratic leadership of both bodies to provide a specific level of funding for key conservation programs, an agreement that was entered into in order to prevent the creation of yet a new entitlement in this area, and yet the committee has walked away from a solemn commitment that it made.

Then we have the environmental riders, or I should say the antienvironmental riders. This bill will exempt the Tongass from any review whatsoever once the regulations are out, and they have not even been completed yet; but this bill will prevent any review of whatever regulations are produced by either administrative challenge or challenge in courts. That is outrageous.

It also includes language which again allows funds in this bill to be used for preliminary activities, preliminary to drilling in ANWR. The worst provision involves an innocuous-sounding program called the Forest Stewardship Pilot Program. Currently, there are 80 projects around the country in which noncommercial organizations work at

thinning growth in forests that are considered vulnerable to fire.

These small projects are not required to get the normal environmental waivers. The House bill proposed to expand the number of projects by 12. The Senate bill would expand the project by 28. Reasonable people can disagree on what ought to happen here, but the conference agreement provides no limits whatsoever. You might as well turn our national forests over lock, stock and barrel to the timber companies. That is what this provision does.

There are no longer any legal limits to what can be cut under this provision. Whatever the administration wants, by all means, go ahead.

Then, as I said earlier, we have some special provisions. I have mentioned the provision in this bill which is here on behalf of a company that operates three chicken plants in Georgia. This provision says that the USDA shall certify chickens as being organic even if they are not fed organic meal. That provision may boost the profits of one company, but it undermines the integrity of the entire organic certification process.

Then there is another nifty little provision that arrived in the Committee on Appropriations last night. It involves the bank accounts of 10 Texas dairy farmers. As we all know, and I know a lot of you like dairy farmers. I do, too. I have a lot of them in my district. They are not getting this kind of treatment.

I was stunned to see what was being done in this bill. It seems that these 10 dairy farmers have herds close to the Mexican border. There have been concerns that the herds might be exposed to bovine tuberculosis, and USDA decided that they ought to be slaughtered. The problem is that if the cows had already been infected the farmers would be able to defer tax payments on the money received from the government; but because the cattle had not yet become infected, that deferral option is not allowed under Tax Code. So somebody decided the only fair thing to do was to have the government pay the taxes in full up front. So this bill contains 15 million bucks to be distributed to 10 farmers to cover their tax liability. Had they received the deferral, their benefit would have only been a fraction of that amount.

So I guess moral of the story is, there is no limit to how rich you can become if you have certain friends on the Committee on Appropriations.

So, Mr. Speaker, I am going to offer a motion to recommit to try to improve this bill in the most egregious area of the bill, and that motion to recommit would negate the language in this bill which allows funds to be used for activities preparatory to drilling in the ANWR. It would also provide funds that eliminate the special rider that abuses the pilot stewardship forest thinning contracting program. We would eliminate the rider that says that Tongass is exempt from all environmental review in court or in administrative activities, and we would raise the first responder funds in this bill to the amount requested by the President. That is what the recommittal motion will do.

There are many other provisions I would like to reach. In a recommittal motion we cannot do it under the rules under which we operate, but we are going to try to at least correct the most egregious antienvironmental provisions in this bill and try to put enough money in for first responders so that you can all go home and look at your firemen and policemen with a straight face.

I would urge support for the recommittal motion when it comes, and I would urge you to use your own judgment in terms of how to vote on final passage.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 10 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I must say, I am amused by the prior speech. I would simply observe with respect to title I, the Republican Party in this House had to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting the very funds which the gentleman so proudly now pointed to on his chart.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 4 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I want to take this time, and so does the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha), in order to express the House's appreciation to Greg Dahlberg, who has served this institution so ably and for so long. For over 20 years he served on the Committee on Appropriations on the Subcommittee on Transportation, on the full committee central staff, and on the Subcommittee on Defense. Since 1994, he was a senior Democratic staffer for defense appropriations which covers virtually all of the military operations in the government.

He was appointed Under Secretary of the Army the last 6 months of the Clinton administration. He volunteered to help the new administration get started, and stayed a few extra months. He has been a personal adviser and great friend to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha) and myself. He has served over 200 Democratic members to help them understand defense issues and to deal with those issues in their districts. He has a deep concern for the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines deployed throughout the world. He loves this institution, and he has given help many times to both Democratic and Republican Members of this institution.

In the defense world there are many opportunities for qualified staff to leave the Hill for more lucrative jobs. Greg has resisted that temptation for many years, and for that we are grateful. We certainly wish him well in his future endeavors. He has been the institutional memory of this House on the budget process and on defense intelligence. He is one of the finest, most dedicated public servants, and one of the most decent human beings I have ever had the privilege to work with.

I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. Speaker, whether it is within the rules of the House or not, I think this institution owes Mr. Dahlberg a round of applause for his service.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I just want to remind the Members of the House what the content of the recommittal motion will be. We will simply strike the antienvironmental riders exempting the Tongass National Forest plan from administrative and judicial review, expanding the Forest Service stewardship contracting demonstration program throughout the United States, turning over the forests of the country to the timber companies lock, stock and barrel if they choose.

It would also reconsider language in the conference agreement which removes the restriction in the House-passed Interior bill which prohibited the use of fiscal 2003 BLM funding for activity related to oil drilling in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

It would add funding for critical conservation resource programs at not less than 2002 levels. That is consistent with an agreement that was made and should be abided by until the year 2006.

And it also would add up to $500 million above the current conference levels to fund training, equipment and assistance for first responders; in other words, bringing it up to the presidential request.

Mr. Speaker, I full well recognize that there are many good things in this bill. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. There are many things that we have to provide. And so I am certainly not going to ask Members to vote against the bill, but I am going to ask them to vote for the recommittal motion if you care about our environmental stewardship and if you really care about providing the equipment and the support necessary to our first responders, our policemen and firemen.

If indeed you want to send them the resources they need rather than duct tape, vote for the motion to recommit.

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

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

At this stage, I certainly am, Mr. Speaker.

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, reserving the right to object.

Mr. Speaker, in a democratic institution, when we have nothing else, the only protections that remain for individual Members and for the constituents that we represent lie in the normal processes of the House. We have just passed a bill in which 90 percent of the dollars contained in that bill were dollars that were never debated on their merits on the House floor. For the last year, this House has engaged in a process of refusing to allow the democratic process that is fundamental to this Nation to manifest itself on the floor of this institution. And as a result, we have never had an opportunity to debate the wisdom of, for instance, cutting the first responders below the President's budget or doing a number of other outrageous things that happened in this bill tonight.

Because I take my institutional responsibilities seriously, I, in the end, most reluctantly voted for the bill that just passed, despite the fact that I am outraged by the process that produced it; I am outraged by the rigidity with which the White House has dealt with these issues; I am outraged that the White House, especially the Office of Management and Budget, have seemed to have determined that it is their way or the highway on all occasions.

I am used to give-and-take and I have had a cooperative relationship, not necessarily a loving relationship, but a cooperative relationship with virtually every President I have served under, including this President's father, and I want to have the same kind of relationship with the White House under these circumstances. But now we are being asked to provide for consideration of a motion tonight which, under the Rules of the House, ought to be brought up tomorrow; and we are being asked to pass a continuing resolution which gives the President more time to consider the very items that we were given no time whatsoever to consider on this floor today. I find that double standard both interesting and quaint and outrageous.

And so I have great respect for the job the gentleman has tried to do, but there are two ways to handle massive legislation like this on the House floor. One is to try to work out differences; and in working out those differences, it is important that one keeps to his or her word. Secondly, the other way to deal with it is just to ram the other side. And in too many instances, including the conference that took place, the full conference that took place the night before last, issues were rammed rather than working out an honest give-and-take arrangement.

So, in my view, if this body believes that the President needs more time to continue to study the document which we were not allowed to study before we voted on it, I am only the ranking Democrat on the committee and I have no idea of the impact of dozens of provisions in this bill; and I simply want to say that because of that, I think that the White House ought to have to exist under the same conditions that we have been forced to exist under. If we have to consider legislation without having an understanding of what is in it, and incidentally I know that Mr. Daniels, the OMB director, told his staff that he was going to be in charge of the conference.

Now, if he has not told the President of the United States what is in this bill, it is a little late, because they have imposed this product on us. So with all due respect, if the House wants to consider a continuing resolution, then it ought to do so under the regular processes of the House by bringing it up tomorrow.

Now, that is going to inconvenience me in a major way. I know it is going to inconvenience a number of my colleagues. But once in a while we have to put duty ahead of convenience, and I to intend to do so in this instance.

Now, under my reservation, I am happy to yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. Speaker, perhaps it should be.

Continuing under my reservation, I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. Speaker, continuing under my reservation, let me just address one bill: the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education bill. That is really the guts of what we do domestically each year.

Now, we have a right to have issues like that debated. We have seen a strategy for the entire previous year which denied the minority the opportunity to even address the substantive issues related to education and health care, worker protection and the like, because there was a conscious strategy on the part of the majority to deny this House the opportunity to even consider those bills until after the election, because they were devoted to a budget resolution which made no sense and did not reflect what even majority party members would vote for after the election was over. So we were asked for a year to frustrate the ability of this institution to consider those major issues; and then after the election, it is all dumped into this pile, and we are told to vote for it, up or down. That is a fundamental abuse of this institution.

We are in the minority. We do not expect to win votes. You are in the majority; you won it fair and square, I honor you for it, and that means that you have a right to run this institution. But you have to run it in a way, if you are true to the traditions of this place, you need to run this institution in a manner which gives both you and us an opportunity to exercise our responsibilities. We have been denied that opportunity for an entire year. And that means that we cannot fulfill our fundamental responsibility as a minority, which is to offer alternatives on appropriation bills if we do not like the product you bring to the floor. And if you have the votes, you win. If you do not have the votes, then you do not. The problem is, we have never been able to figure out who had the votes, because we have never been able to vote.

So, under those circumstances, we have engaged in a charade for a year, and this is the product of the charade. And there is a lot of garbage in this pile, and I am telling my colleagues that a lot of people who voted for it are going to wish they had not voted for it, and there is a lot of garbage that would not be in this pile if we had been able to consider these bills on an individual basis.

So all I am saying is, after we have seen this total abuse of process for now over a year, we are now asked, once again, to forgo the right of the minority to notice on an issue, again for the convenience of the very people who put us through this in the process. I do not believe in the Bridge on the River Kwai syndrome. I do not believe in cooperating with people who are abusing the process by which this institution is supposed to run. So despite that fact, I have given my cooperation in many instances, as the gentleman knows, procedurally.

But it is very simple tonight. If you want a continuing resolution, I want us to get back to the normal processes, and I want us to deal with people on the basis of those normal processes; and that means that the normal process is if you really want a CR, come in tomorrow and pass it. But I do not intend to give unanimous consent request to consider it tonight.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. Speaker, continuing under my reservation, I would simply say that I think the gentleman has been totally open. I fully agree with that. The problem has not been him.

The problem has been that while he has tried to keep the process open, we have been denied our fundamental right as a minority to even offer amendments to the products that your committee has produced, and then all of the deals are made behind closed doors. If anyone attended the conference two nights ago, one of our members asked Senator Stevens, he said, what is the process by which we are going to determine the outcome of the items that are still open in conference? And the response he got from the chairman of the conference was, the same process that was used to consider the items that are already closed. That process was simply a process in private where decisions were made by the majority.

Now, in the end, the majority is going to win most of these; I understand that. But we have a right to have honest differences considered, and at least we have the right to have those honest differences addressed in full view of the public and the press so that the public can determine which argument has the better of it, but they have been denied this time and time again, and we are fed up.

I am fed up with it. So I am going to, at every opportunity, take full advantage of whatever rights we have on the floor to try to see to it that we never have happen again in this institution this kind of nonsense because of the denial of the regular legislative process over the course of many months.

So I most regretfully suggest, if the gentleman wants to extend a courtesy to the White House that the majority would not extend to its own Members

and to us, then by all means, I am ready to consider that tomorrow, but not tonight.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman does not have any further questions, I regretfully object.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, this is the eighth continuing resolution to come before this body necessitated by the fact that we are now in the fifth month of the new fiscal year and still do not have a budget. We have not provided the funds that should be provided for homeland security. The Congress has not provided the funds that should be provided for first responders, for education, to deal with some Medicare and Medicaid problems, and there are many other concerns as well associated with the late action of the Congress on the appropriation bills.

None of that fault lies with the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. He has tried his dead level best to bring appropriations bills to the floor in a timely fashion. He has been shut off by decisions made at a higher pay grade. At this point, this House has no choice except to once again extend the continuing resolution.

But there are, nonetheless, some items which I think are necessary to take action on because time is running out. The clock is running on a number of crucial problems. For that reason, and I will take the time to explain it now so I do not have to do it twice in the interest of saving time. For that reason, at the appropriate time I will offer a motion to recommit which instructs the Committee on Appropriations to report back an amended version of the continuing resolution that adds two urgent provisions related to payment rates for medical services to Medicare patients.

The existing continuing resolution already contains several provisions relating to entitlement benefits, including extensions of the Transitional Assistance to Needy Families program, TANF, and the transitional Medicaid benefits program. This motion simply adds two more time-sensitive items relating to Medicare.

First, the motion calls for continuation of Medicare payment rates for doctors at the current level, thereby suspending the 4.4 percent cut now scheduled to take place on March 1.

There has already been a 5.4 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors that took effect in January, 2002. These payment cuts make it difficult for doctors to meet their expenses and can only make it harder for Medicare patients to find a doctor willing to treat them. The problem is especially acute in rural areas which are already suffering from shortages of doctors and other health care providers.

Second, the motion would take a first step toward redressing the imbalances in the Medicare payments rate that right now puts rural hospitals at a serious disadvantage. Under current law, hospitals in large urban areas receive a base payment rate that is higher than the rate for all other hospitals. The Medicare Payments Advisory Commission has recommended eliminating this differential, noting that Medicare operating margins for rural hospitals are now substantially lower than for large urban hospitals. That just confirms what many of us have been hearing back home, that most rural hospitals are facing serious financial difficulty that jeopardizes their ability to provide quality care.

This motion calls for raising base payment rates for rural and small city hospitals up to the rate for large urban areas. These two provisions are just first steps toward redressing imbalances in Medicare payment rates. Congress needs to overhaul the faulty formulas that led to the steep cuts in payment rates and to address a range of issues that place rural areas and many States at a disadvantage. But to gain time for the appropriate committees and the Congress to deal with these broader issues, we need immediate fixes to the immediate problem. That is what this motion seeks to do.

Both of these items in the motion are also included in the Senate- passed omnibus appropriations package that is now in conference, the conference to which the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) just referred. Hopefully, a conference agreement on that measure will be finished quickly and with these items included. But we should also include these measures in the continuing resolution as a backup, which is what this motion would do.

Furthermore, adoption of this motion would also send a strong signal to House conferees on the omnibus appropriations package and to the House leadership regarding the sentiment of the House on the urgent need to fix Medicare payment rates. Even though the 4.4 percent cut in Medicare physician payments is just weeks away, the House has done nothing effective to forestall that cut. The problem is urgent. The House needs to act now. That is what this motion will attempt to do.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Stark).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murtha), well known for his objection to short debates.

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

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

Without the motion's adoption, Mr. Speaker, I certainly am.

Mr. Speaker, I will not take the 5 minutes. I have already explained the motion. Let me simply say I think the need for it is self-evident. It is certainly obvious that small rural hospitals are in a tough financial situation and need relief, and it is certainly obvious that if the scheduled reduction in physician payments under Medicare goes into effect that it will negatively affect many, many Medicare patients.

I might not offer this amendment if I thought that the conference was going more smoothly than it is, but certainly in a number of subcommittees there are raging controversies yet to be resolved, and I think under those circumstances it is important that we go on record in support of this proposition.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield on that point?

Mr. Speaker, tell me then, is the gentleman objecting to the fact that the Republican chairman of the Committee on the Budget and the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee has asked us to take this action?

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 offer a motion to instruct conferees.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 10 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, Article I of the Constitution states that no money can be drawn from the Treasury except by act of Congress.

That is the essence of the separation and balance of power in this government. It is the core function of this body. It is what makes this a legislative body, not a Soviet-style rubber stamp.

So let me ask what some Members might find to be a somewhat embarrassing question: How did the House of Representatives get through an entire session of Congress last year without ever even calling up for debate Senate appropriation bills that fund more than three- quarters of the government outside of the Department of Defense? Now I am not asking why we failed to pass the bills. There can be numerous answers to that question. I am not asking why we did not complete the conference report. That could easily be blamed on the intransigence or inaction of the other body.

What I am asking is how could be we fail to even call up for debate on this floor, on this floor, the basic pieces of legislation to fund the government when that is our fundamental responsibility as an institution.

Mr. Speaker, this is the 108th Congress. This is the 215th year in which this body has gathered to perform our duties under the Constitution. As a result, it is quite difficult to do something in Congress that has never been done before, but I think this body in the last Congress actually succeeded in that respect. The House Republican leadership never even let these bills out of committee, never debated on the House floor whether the amounts requested or the sums recommended by the committee were too much or too little, never allowed the elected representatives of the American people to vote on any of these matters.

The result, the party that is oh, so noisy in talking about accountability for teachers and schools is oh, so silent when it comes to the accountability of Members of Congress. You cannot be held accountable for the choices you never make, and that is the game that has gone on here for almost a year.

Mr. Speaker, how can there be a more fundamental breakdown of the institution? What a disgrace. What was it that we did all year that was so important we could not at least call these bills up?

I want to make it quite clear, there is one person in this institution who I am not referring to, and that is the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, who has gone to the mat time and time again to try to get this House to meet its responsibilities. He has spoken on the subject often and eloquently, and it is in spite of his very considerable efforts that we find ourselves where we are today.

In my mind there is one issue at the bottom of this: the majority party leadership in this House abandoned its central responsibility under the Constitution and to the American people in order to get political cover on one issue. They love to talk the talk on education, but they are not willing to walk the walk. They are not willing to put their money where their mouths are. Oh, yes, they like to visit schools. They like to read to children when the cameras are around; and oh, they love to make TV ads about how important education is and how much they care about it. They like to vote for big, expensive authorization programs creating new major responsibilities for local boards to meet, and they like to promise huge sums of Federal money to pay for them. They love to do all of those things.

There is only one thing that they apparently cannot and will not do, and that is pay the bill afterwards. Now most people have seen a con artist in action, at least in the movies. They have the capacity to seem in almost every respect to be someone quite different from whom they really are. That is what the majority party has done over the last several years with respect to education. Of course, the only time they get caught at the game is when the appropriations bills are on the floor. That is the one point in time when all of the pretty images fall apart, all of photo ops, press releases and slick TV ads, that is the time when they do not run true; and that is why this day has been delayed for almost 8 months, well after the election, well after the opportunity of the American people to measure whether the rhetoric coming out of the Congress and this administration has anything whatsoever to do with the reality as far as education is concerned.

Unfortunately, even now we do not have an appropriate bill in front of us. We do not have specific funding levels proposed for specific programs. We have the most confusing hodgepodge of numbers it would be possible to concoct, and a motion to go to conference on those numbers. That is an open invitation to have a small group of people bring back an all-or-nothing omnibus package so big and so complex and so late in the year that we can claim that we just had to vote for it, even though it is on a program-by-program basis 180 degrees at variance with what a large majority of this body claims to support.

Today I want to give this House an opportunity to send a different message to the conference. I want to give Members on the other side of the aisle who truly believe what they say about resources in the classroom, better teachers, small classes, stronger curriculum a chance to stand up and say to Mitch Daniels and their leadership here in the House that they are for real, that they insist on a bottom line that is much higher for education than the numbers that my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula), has been given to work with.

Our motion to instruct simply says that the allocation to the bill that contains education funding shall not be smaller when the bill comes back to the House than the sums contained in the Senate bill. If we take all of the increases the Senate says it would like to make in that bill, we find ourselves $9.55 billion over the level the House has allocated to the Regula bill. Even after we subtract the remarkable across-the-board cuts contained in the Senate package, this bill is about $5.7 billion above House levels. CBO has not scored it yet, and so we do not have precise numbers; but that is about where we believe the Senate ends up.

We are asking that the House direct its conferees to begin this conference by agreeing with the Senate on that overall funding level. It is not at the level of increase in our schools that we have provided in any of the last 6 years. It would mean that the result of all of the time and debate we spent in enacting No Child Left Behind would be to scale back the funds that we are sending to schools. It is not the level that we can and should provide, but under the rules we are working under it is the best we can do; and it is without any question the least we should do. I would simply note, by the way, that the bludgeoning-nature of the across-the-board cuts provided by the Senate has resulted in unacceptable damage to a number of other crucial activities in areas such as health and science.

There are two other parts to this motion. One is that the level of funds for homeland security activities in this package shall not fall below the levels requested by the President so far as it

is possible within the scope of the conference. Yesterday, I catalogued just how inadequate the President's budget is for homeland security, for port protection, for first responders. But the Senate's across-the- board cuts have taken more than a billion dollars from homeland security activities. Our intent is to restore those funds. It, at the very least, will make clear that the education funds will not be coming from homeland security.

Finally, we have a crisis in veterans' medical care. The across-the- board cuts in the Senate bill significantly exacerbates that crisis. We direct in this motion the conferees to go to the highest possible level for veterans' medical care that is within the scope of the conference.

I will be very blunt about this instruction. If anyone votes for it, they are setting parameters on the conference that do not permit the conference to come back within the allocation that Mitch Daniels and the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle) have established. This motion says to them that the line that they have drawn in the sand for education and other domestic needs is unrealistic. We need to move on and resolve these differences, and we need to support local schools. This is not the end of the process; this is step one.

If a majority of this body votes to agree with the Senate that we need this $5.7 billion increase for education, and the Congress then agrees to a conference report that rejects the position taken by both Houses, the American people will then know exactly what is going on around here. They are going to know at that point exactly how phony all of these press releases and TV ads on education have been.

Mr. Speaker, no one should vote for this motion if they intend to vote for a later conference report that scales back funding for the very education programs we are trying to protect by this motion. That would be an act of hypocrisy that would be startling even by the standards of this town.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts, the new ranking member of the Committee on Financial Services.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), the ranking member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday this House refused to provide the financial assistance necessary to our local firemen and policemen and other first responders whose responsibility it is to be our first line of defense against terrorist attacks in communities throughout this country.

Today I would hope that the House would not take action to deny the health care resources that American veterans need and deserve. I would hope we would not deny them the funds that those veterans need in order to avoid the kind of service cutoffs that we have seen the VA announce over recent weeks.

I know the name of the game on the part of the White House and the majority party leadership is to preserve every possible dollar on the table for tax cuts, a huge percentage of which are aimed at the most well-off 1 percent of the folks in our society who make more than $300,000. I understand that that is the name of the game. But in my view, while I certainly wish those folks well and while I think they ought to share in the same tax cuts provided other people, I think that veterans need VA health care more than someone who is earning $500,000 a year needs to have an extra jumbo-sized tax cut.

So I would simply ask Members of this House, do not, please, pose for political ``holy pictures'' by having photo ops at local schools, if the only thing you are willing to send those local schools is a new set of mandates without the money to help pay for them. Do not do that. School districts are in too big a squeeze and State governments with their financial problems are in too big a squeeze already.

All we are asking you to do is, within the possibilities presented by this conference report, we are asking you to vote for the maximum amount possible in order to come closer than we will otherwise come to meeting the promises so far unfulfilled of the No Child Left Behind Act.

I urge a ``yes'' vote on the motion to instruct.

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, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, after 9-11, it became obvious to all of us, I think on both sides of the aisle, that we needed to equip the people at the local level who will respond to terrorist attacks with the best equipment that we could possibly find to make certain their equipment was compatible and safe enough to do the job. For reasons that I find difficult to fathom, the White House has resisted efforts to do that on four separate occasions.

The first example is what happened on the supplemental a year ago. After 9-11, the committee, on both sides of the aisle, agreed that we ought to add more money for first responders, and we tried to do that. The White House strenuously resisted. In fact, at one point the President personally told us that he would veto one dime more than the White House had appropriated for homeland security items. Despite that fact, on a bipartisan basis, the House and the Senate approved $400 million in funding for first responders in that supplemental.

Then, last year, in their second supplemental which the administration sent up, they still provided no request for first responders. Again, the House and the Senate, acting on a bipartisan basis in both Houses provided, after much White House resistance, $551 million for first responders for firemen, for policemen, and the other folks at the local level who are our first line of defense against terrorist attacks in our communities. The President vetoed $350 million of that $500 million.

Finally, the administration did request $3.5 billion for first responders in the regular 2003 appropriations bill, but it then proceeded to back the political strategy in the House that prevented the veterans under the VA-HUD bill from coming to the floor; and it prevented the State, Justice, Commerce appropriations bill from coming to the floor. As a result, neither of those bills which were supposed to contain funding for first responders, neither of those bills passed. And then, when the continuing resolution finally passed, which was supposed to contain $650 million for first responders, the White House saw to it that the agency would not apportion that money among the States and localities.

So after we have that track record, the White House resistance to bipartisan congressional support for adding money for first responders, the White House chief of staff went on national television last Sunday, Mr. Card did, and told Mr. Russert, the moderator, and the entire country that the only reason first responders were not getting their money is because the Congress had not done its job.

Baloney. In capital letters, BALONEY.

The fact is that both political parties, on a bipartisan basis in both the House and the Senate, on four separate occasions tried to meet our responsibilities in providing the funding that was needed for first responders and, the White House, in each of those instances, either flatly rejected the money or saw to it that they would use their power in order to squeeze down the amount of money that we wanted to provide for those initiatives.

So now, what I am going to urge Members to do when we get to the resolution today is to vote for a motion which we will offer which restores that needed money for first responders.

It is time for two things to happen: it is time for the White House to stop peddling fiction about why the first responders at the local level do not have badly needed money to deal with terrorism problems at the local level; and, secondly, it is time for us to actually get the money out to them so that we do not have to sit, the next time we have a terrorist attack saying, gee whiz, I wish we had done something.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 7 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to spend just a moment or two discussing how we got to this place, and then repeat for emphasis what I just said on the rule, so people understand what it is we are going to be trying to do here today.

We are really in the situation where, well into the fiscal year, we have yet to pass 11 of the 13 appropriation bills, primarily because the budget resolution that was brought to this House floor in the first instance unrealistically stated what the needs of the country would be, or the congressional estimate of what those needs would be. So to try to keep the session moving anyway, the majority party brought out two appropriation bills. Then the system just sort of fell apart because of the unreality of the budget resolution, and we have been stuck with no other appropriation bills becoming law, so we have been operating on continuing resolutions.

I would ask the gentleman, is this continuing resolution number 13? Something like that. I have lost track, we have had so many of them.

Now we are supposed to pass yet another continuing resolution so that the House and Senate have more time in order to put together an omnibus appropriation bill which will at long last produce funding for all of the domestic agencies in the Federal Government. So this proposal is here to give us another week to get that work done.

Mr. Speaker, we have two questions left. Number 1 is, what is the appropriate funding for those appropriation bills; and number 2, when are we going to get it done? As far as I know, we still do not have paper on this side of the Capitol, so we still do not know what the Senate has done in detail.

This proposal before us now simply keeps the government open. The question is, what level of funding should we have in this short-term CR? We believe that, in addition to the funding that is being provided under the resolution being brought to the floor by the gentleman from Florida, we ought to add another $3.5 billion to fund the first responders, so that our policemen and our firemen and our public health people can get about the business of protecting us at the local level. We cannot expect State governments to provide this money, because they are in massive deficits all around the country. If we do not provide it, it is not going to get provided.

The second thing we want to do is to provide $90 million to Centers for Disease Control for baseline health screening, so we can do a long- term assessment of the health exposure experienced by first providers at the Pentagon and in New York on 9-11 when they ran into the combat zone, so to speak, and experienced an assault by many chemicals, some of which were suspected of being highly toxic.

So that is what we want to do. As I said, I think it is especially important to do this in light of the misstatement by the White House Chief of Staff on national television last week. Last week, as I said in my earlier remarks, Mr. Card, the White House Chief of Staff, told Tim Russert, the moderator of Meet the Press, that the reason that the first responders did not have the money that they needed was because Congress had not acted on the money and had tied it up.

I found that especially quaint given the fact that the President vetoed the lion's share of the money that we provided for first responders in the supplemental last year, money which would have gone through to the local communities if the administration had not vetoed bipartisan congressional efforts. So what we see is that on four occasions, as I said earlier, the White House has either blocked or resisted bipartisan efforts in both Houses to provide additional money for first responders.

I will ask the House at the proper time today to approve this motion to recommit so that we can add this funding. I want to point out that it will still keep us within the Republican budget resolution. We will still have over $1 billion head room in the Republican budget resolution if we add this amendment, because the continuing resolution is operating at a funding level significantly below that Republican funding resolution.

So I do not want to hear any claptrap on the floor today about how we are busting the budget with this motion. We are not; we are staying within the confines of the Republican budget resolution. But within that, we are saying it is time, it is time to deliver the money that the first responders thought they were going to get a long time ago, so we can get about the business, for a change, of dealing with substantive problems, rather than ping-ponging political arguments while we send no money to the people who are going to be on the front lines if we have any further terrorist attacks.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I want to walk through once more what the record is with respect to dealing with this problem.

Right after 9-11, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and I went down

to the White House. He and I and our staff chiefs, when we were locked out of our offices because of the anthrax scare, he and I went downtown to the White House after we had spent a week talking to every security agency in town, virtually, trying to find out what they thought the needs were on the homeland security front.

We went down to the White House, expecting to have a give-and-take discussion about what additional funding we ought to provide. We ran smack into the President of the United States, who walked into the room, shook hands, sat down, and then said, and I am paraphrasing, but this is pretty close, he said, well, I understand some of you want to provide more money for homeland security; but I want you to know that my good friend, Mitch Daniels, tells me that we have more than enough money in the budget for our request. I want you to know if Congress spends one dime more on homeland security than we have asked for in our budget, I will veto the bill. Now I have time for four or five comments, and then I have to get out of here. That is what he said.

So when my turn came, I expressed my lack of enthusiasm to that kind of rigid response, and I proceeded to ask the President a number of questions about security threats to a number of Federal installations, threats which were serious and classified. We urged the President to reconsider.

In the end, over White House opposition, this Congress on a bipartisan basis provided $4 billion additional money for homeland security, including, I believe, about $400 million for first responders. Then last year in the spring supplemental, as I indicated earlier, the White House asked for no additional money for first responders; so no money for our policemen, no money for our firemen, no money for our public health people.

The House and Senate worked again on a bipartisan basis, and we provided $551 million in that supplemental. The President vetoed $350 million of that amount. Then finally the administration slowly awoke, and it provided $3.5 billion in their budget request for 2003; but then they cooperated in a procedure that prevented that money from ever becoming law, because they agreed with the procedure that kept the VA- HUD bill and the State-Justice-Commerce bill from ever coming to the floor.

So now we are operating under a continuing resolution which provides $650 million, far less than we need for first responders. We need several billion more. Yet, even after the administration had that authority to spend the money, they refused to allocate the money to the States. They have been fiddling around about proposed formula changes, rather than getting the stuff out there so we can accelerate our preparedness at the local level.

If Members think we are ready for another attack, I invite them to read the report of the Rudman-Hart Commission, which spells out that we are still mortally unprepared to deal with local attacks.

So now we are faced with this situation, and despite the fact that the track record clearly shows that the administration has been resistent to congressional efforts to provide assistance to first responders, the White House Chief of Staff has told the country that it is the Congress that has not provided the money, when in fact the Congress on three occasions did provide the money or tried to and on each of those occasions the White House resisted.

So what we will be asking the House to do is to provide this additional funding: the $3.5 billion to first responders and the $90 million for the epidemiological studies of the health impacts on the firemen and police personnel who had to respond at the Pentagon and in New York after 9-11. And we would remind our friends on both sides of the aisle that this does not bust the budget. If you vote for our amendment, it will still keep us within the Republican budget resolution which seems to be so important on that side of the aisle.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Let me simply say to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) that as far as I am concerned he has done everything humanly possible to try to see to it that we could provide the needed money to first responders. He tried that a year ago on the supplemental when he was pushed into backing away by the White House and by his own leadership, but we still got $4 billion additional homeland security money in that bill despite the resistance of the White House. And he also worked with us cooperatively to see to it that we had more money in the supplemental this previous summer for homeland security and for first responders. Again, the White House vetoed those efforts, so I congratulate the gentleman for his efforts. I just wish that the White House had been responsive to them. If they had, we would not be sitting here now worrying about the fact that they still do not have dime one that they need at the local level.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Turner).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 15 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, we have been hearing we will do it next time around for a year and a half. Meanwhile, you have gotten zip to the local people who need it the most. We were told a year ago, oh, we will do it down the line. We were told in the supplemental, oh, we will do it down the line. Now you are saying here, we will do it down the line. Do it now.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman mentioned supplemental. I would suggest he call the White House and tell the President to reconsider his veto of the last supplemental that we sent to him where he denied us the ability to get $300 million to those first responders.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 10 seconds.

It does require a partnership between the local and Federal Government. The problem is the Federal Government will not come out on the dance floor and dance. They are leaving the locals out there alone. They have yet to provide one dime in new money.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 \1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Slaughter).

Mr. Speaker, how much time is remaining on both sides?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez).

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

Mr. Speaker, could I inquire again how much time we have remaining on each side?

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

(Mrs. MALONEY asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks, and include extraneous material.)

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 \1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley).

Mr. Speaker, I yield the remaining 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the distinguished minority leader.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, let me simply say the gentleman is correct, we did; and I was immensely proud of the House on both sides of the aisle for cooperating in producing that bill, and I was flabbergasted that that cooperation on the part of the White House did not extend to our next request to provide for additional money, including the first responders.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

Without the pending recommit motion, certainly.

I certainly do, Mr. Speaker.

The gentleman contends the motion is not in order because the majority has failed to file its 302(b) allocations. If this amendment were to be ruled out of order, what that would mean is that the majority has put the fix in in the Committee on Rules so that they can bring what they want to bring to the floor but the minority cannot.

In other words, the minority would be penalized procedurally for a failure to act on the part of the majority. I would find that to be a quaint interpretation indeed. It is patently unfair to allow the majority to bring up a bill without filing its suballocations and then punish the minority for something the majority has not done.

Mr. Speaker, if the majority is going to abuse the rules in such a way that the minority is precluded from meeting its responsibilities, I have no alternative but to appeal the ruling of the Chair.

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 have another motion to recommit at the desk.

Safe assumption, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I will not take the 5 minutes, but let me simply say that this motion simply does two things. It would provide that we will approve $3.5 billion in homeland security grants to first responders, and it will provide the additional $90 million that is needed to continue the study of long-term medical effects caused by the disaster of 9-11 when our firemen and our policemen and other emergency workers immediately responded to the hits on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

When those firemen and policemen and other emergency workers responded to the Nation's needs at the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center and in Pennsylvania, for that matter as well, on 9-11, they did not stop to ask does this fit in our fiscal year? Are we going to exceed our budgets? They simply responded, did their duty, and did what had to be done. Today I want to make clear this motion will not bust the Republican budget. Even if this money is still provided, we will still be within the overall ceilings of the Republican budget resolution. So no one can claim if they vote against this motion that they did so in order to preserve the sanctity of the budget, resolution because we do not breach it.

I would simply urge the House to adopt the motion.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, what is happening here is that this is the first of two continuing resolutions which the House is going to endeavor to pass tonight. The first is simply a vehicle by which we keep the government open for the next 30 days or so, while the Congress at long last gets about the business of finishing what it should have done last year; namely, virtually all of the domestic appropriation bills.

The second continuing resolution that will be voted on after this one will be an empty vehicle which is sent to the Senate, and the Senate will then use that as the carrying vehicle for the work that they do to put together all of the remaining appropriation bills.

As I was saying, the Senate will then proceed to work its will on the remaining domestic appropriation bills. They will then put them together in one package in the second CR, which we will send over, and they will come back to the House for an up or down vote as a conference report. That effectively means that the House will have been shielded from any responsibility to take visible positions on virtually all of the issues involved in education, in health care, in the Labor Department programs, in housing programs, in science programs, foreign aid, you name it. That, I believe, is the purpose of this process.

I do not happen to think that is a very healthy process but that is what the plan is. What that means is that tonight represented the only opportunity for Members of this body to speak to any of the issues that would be funded by this continuing resolution.

Now, the rules of the House provide that if the Committee on Appropriations has not passed a new 302(b) allocation, allocating the total resources of the committee that are available to us to the various subcommittees, then the House is precluded from considering an appropriation bill. So last night the Committee on Rules waived that provision for the majority so that the majority is able to proceed with this process today, but they refused to waive it for the minority, which means that we cannot offer any significant or meaningful amendments to the continuing resolution.

If we had not been denied that right, we wanted to offer a $5 billion package that essentially asked the House to, once again, approve matters which it approved in the supplemental last summer. Half of that would be the $2.5 billion that we provided for additional homeland security items, additional port protection, additional border protection, additional support to the FBI to modernize its computer system, additional translators and the like. All of that money has already been voted for by 90 percent of the Members of both parties in this House, but it has been effectively impounded by the President who declined to spend that $2.5 billion, thus leaving this country needlessly exposed on the homeland security front.

The other $2 billion or so that we wanted to add represented other items that the House had already voted for: The $274 million which was badly needed for veterans medical care to clean up the backlog at veterans facilities; the $401 million which was necessary to provide aid to first responders, our police and our firemen at the local level; and $200 million to assist with anti-terrorist actions on the part of the State of Israel, for instance, all of that has been denied us because the House Committee on Rules essentially said that there should be one set of rules for the majority and another set of rules for the minority.

Now, as I said earlier today on the floor, the purpose of rules in any venue is to see to it that all people are treated the same, and that is true whether you are talking about a San Francisco 49er and New York Giant football game or whether you are talking about actions on the floor of the House. We are supposed to have rules that apply equally to everybody, but thanks to the misguided and misbegotten action of the Committee on Rules that is not what we are going to have.

So what that means is that this House, which is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world, has been turned into something that much more clearly represents a Soviet Congress than it represents the embodiment of democratic representation.

What this means is that a small group of insider Members in the Republican leadership have essentially decided ahead of time what the outcome should be on all of these appropriation bills, and now they have fixed the process so that there is no practical possibility whatsoever of changing in any way that desired outcome. That may be an effective use of power, but it is a fundamental corruption of the legislative process that goes to the heart of democratic government, and people who engage in that kind of conduct, in my view, should be ashamed of themselves.

So what we are faced with is the necessity to try to use extraordinary means in order to try to gain some ability to define what actions we on this side of the aisle believe are in the best interests of the country. Mr. Speaker, I detest the idea of having to go after House traditions and normal House procedures. I do not like, for instance, to have to try to appeal the ruling of the Chair on matters, but when we are denied the legitimate exercise of our rights to define differences, which is supposed to be the subject of legislative debate, then we are left with no choice but to engage in extraordinary measures as a matter of protest.

Now, we have not created this situation. The House Republican leadership and the House Committee on Rules has. I would urge them to reconsider.

Yesterday, we heard all kinds of nice words about bipartisanship. The Speaker said that we should respect each other. We do not feel that much respect has been shown this institution when the normal processes of this institution are cut short for the partisan convenience of the party that happens to control this House.

So I wanted to explain why it is that we on this side of the aisle are unhappy and why we will be doing what we are doing tonight.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings), a member of the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, we are not objecting to this process tonight because we are unhappy we are in the minority. We are in the minority, and we expect to lose 99 percent of the votes around here. But we do not expect to have denied to us the opportunity to at least engage in the debate.

My question is, what is the majority party afraid of? Our colleagues in the majority have the votes, and if they think we are wrong, outvote us. But the Committee on Rules has taken us beyond that. What the Committee on Rules has done is that they have said, ``Sorry, we are not going to even allow an opportunity to raise any of these questions.''

Now, this issue came up in March of 1999 when the Republicans were also in control. The exact same situation arose. At that time the majority party did the right thing. The Republican Party waived the rule for the majority so that we could proceed, but they also waived the rule so that we could participate equally in the process. That is what the majority party should have done this time around. They should have followed their own earlier example.

I would also say that, in effect, what is happening is that the minority party is being prevented from doing its job because the majority party neglected to pass a 302 allocation. We did not make the determination on this side that that would not happen; the majority party did. So the minority party is being penalized for the inaction of the majority party. That is quaint in any legislative body.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Edwards).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 additional minute to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank).

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield for a point of clarification?

Mr. Speaker, let me make clear to the gentleman, if our amendment is passed, we are still substantially below the Republican budget resolution numbers. We do not exceed the amount dictated by the White House. We simply make sure that the money is used for homeland security, for the SEC, and for the other items that you have already voted for in the supplemental.

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

I take this time, Mr. Speaker, to explain to the House the amendment that I will shortly offer. That amendment will do essentially two things: it would provide an additional $308 million for the Securities and Exchange Commission to increase funding to the level agreed to in the Sarbanes-Oxley bill. Secondly, it would make available $5.1 billion in critical funding already agreed to by the House last year as contingent emergencies in the fiscal year 2002 supplemental. That money will pay for items such as helping to find, arrest and deport high-risk individuals who have disregarded the departure date on their visas. It would provide for increased security of U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear materials at DOE weapons labs, money which the DOE has asked for. It would provide money for the Customs Container Security initiative suggested by the agency. It would provide $275 million for veterans health care, which this House has already approved on a contingent appropriation basis. It would provide $415 million for grants to State and local first responders, and a variety of other items which the House has already approved, but which the President has declined to release.

As I told the House earlier today, right after the election I was watching McNeil-Lehrer. In their panel discussion, Tom Oliphant, the columnist, was asked what the role of the Democratic Party was going to be now that the Republican Party had all of the marbles in every institution. He said, ``Well, their obligation as the minority is to offer alternatives to what the majority proposes.'' That is exactly what we are trying to do. The problem with the rule that was adopted earlier is that it attempts to preclude us from meeting those responsibilities as a minority to offer constructive alternatives. In the process, it also denies the ability to hold either the majority or the minority accountable for the decisions they make. That is why we are attempting to move forward with this amendment.

I would hope when the time comes that no point of order is lodged against the amendment so that we can, in fact, meet the obligations that we have in this House to be a real legislative body, not a Soviet- style Congress where a few unknown individuals make decisions and then subvert the process in order to predetermine the outcome.

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

Mr. Speaker, I offer a motion to recommit.

I think the Speaker can safely assume that, yes.

Mr. Speaker, what the gentleman from Minnesota is asserting is that the minority should not be allowed to offer a legitimate amendment because the majority did not fulfill its responsibilities to abide by certain provisions of the Budget Act and by the timetable of that act. I find that highly objectionable especially since the Committee on Rules has already waived the requirement as far as the majority party is concerned. It seems to me that the House rules certainly ought to allow the minority the same privilege that the majority has arranged by rule.

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 offer an alternative motion to recommit at the desk.

I certainly am, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, this motion to recommit would do three things: It would modify the language in the Department of Homeland Security legislation to prevent existing corporations who moved offshore to avoid paying their fair share of taxes from getting government contracts from that agency. It would bring the bill back in line with the language this House voted to include by a vote of 318 to 110 on the motion to recommit offered by the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro) last July.

The Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated that over the next 10 years corporate expatriates would cost us more than $4 billion in funds that could help pay for our Nation's security.

The second point of this motion to recommit would be to suspend the operation of one of the most egregious provisions inserted into the Department of Homeland Security legislation at the last minute last year. That is a provision apparently designed to shield the giant drugmaker Eli Lilly & Company from lawsuits that have been brought by parents of autistic children claiming that their children's disease was caused by a vaccine preservative.

There may be good reason to ultimately require claims of this type to be brought under the Federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, but if that is done, it should be done openly in the sunshine after proper hearings and deliberation, not in a back room deal at the last moment.

Thirdly, this motion would restore the authority of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure to review the leasing of space for the new Department of Homeland Security, replacing the provision in the CR that simply approves the administration proposal without any congressional oversight or scrutiny whatsoever.

We do not stop them from going forward, we simply say that they must follow the procedure of having some review by the committee of jurisdiction before they proceed to spend a great deal of taxpayers' money on leasing property which at this point has been reviewed and overseen by no one whatsoever in the Congress.

I yield to the gentlewoman from Connecticut.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

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

Let me simply say that in Wisconsin only cows chew cuds twice, and so we have the same concerns about the consideration of this resolution, but we have already made those concerns quite clear. I see no point in dragging it out.

Let me simply say that with respect to the one difference between this resolution and the previous resolution, on this side of the aisle we agree with the provision that the gentleman is providing. I think it is a constructive provision.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

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

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, let me just point out, the name of our party is not the Democrat Party. It is the Democratic Party. We would appreciate it if we would at least be called by our proper name, okay?

I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, what is happening here today is that the democratic processes in the institution that is supposed to represent the finest of democratic traditions in the world are being mutilated, and I want to explain what I mean by that.

The majority party for the last year has been able to prevent this House from making any significant decisions whatsoever on 90 percent of the domestic budget. They have succeeded in preventing the education, health and labor bill from coming to the floor for a vote. They succeeded in preventing the science budget, the housing budget, the veterans budget and others from coming to the floor.

And now that we are past the election, they are now doing two things. By this resolution before us today, they are making it possible for the House to consider two resolutions, both of which will be sent to the Senate. The first resolution will continue the authority to keep the government open for 1 month, and the second resolution will be used as a vehicle to which the Senate will then attach all of the remaining appropriation bills as they have been worked out in the Senate. It will be attached to that vehicle and then sent back here for an up-or-down vote, and no Member will have any opportunity to affect that package in any way whatsoever. That will mean that we will have gone an entire year without any degree of accountability for the actions of either the majority party or the minority party. Our last opportunity to affect the content of that budget comes today on these resolutions. We are being denied again an opportunity to provide any meaningful alternative to the proposition that is being put together by the majority party.

The House rules say that if the Committee on Appropriations has not passed what is called a 302(b) allocation under which it takes its spending authority and allocates that authority to the 13 different subcommittees, if the committee has not done that, then the rules of the House say that the House cannot consider an appropriation bill. The Committee on Rules agreed to waive that provision for the majority, so they are allowing the majority to bring a bill to the floor allowing for a huge amount of spending, but they did not afford the same privilege to the minority. That means that we cannot offer any meaningful amendment to the funding level being provided by the majority.

There are reasons for rules. Whether you are talking about a New York Giants-San Francisco 49ers game or whether you are talking about the House floor, the purpose of rules is to see to it that everybody is treated the same. What this rule in essence says is that there is only one team that can even touch the ball; that is, the Republican majority team. And it says the Democratic team can have no opportunity whatsoever to have any impact on the outcome. That destroys the ability of this place to be a legitimate representative body.

After the election, I was watching McNeil-Lehrer, and I noticed in the panel that they had, the moderator asked the panel, what were the roles going to be for the Republican and Democratic Party after the election. When they discussed the Democratic Party, Tom Oliphant, the distinguished columnist, said, ``Well, they are now the minority party and so it is their responsibility to offer alternatives to the majority party's propositions.'' That is correct. But we are being denied by this rule by the majority party the opportunity to offer meaningful alternatives. That is bad for us, but it is also bad for the majority party because it means that there is no way to hold the majority party accountable for its decisions and there is no way to judge whether their decisions or ours are better, or more in tune with the country's needs. That is a disastrous result in what is supposed to be the most representative body on the face of the Earth.

If we had not been boxed out by the illegitimate action of the Committee on Rules, what we wanted to do is to offer a simple amendment which would put the House on record supporting expenditures which the majority party has already voted for on the supplemental. We wanted to make certain that the $2.5 billion in homeland security items, for port security, for border security, for FBI computers, et cetera, we wanted to make certain that those contingent appropriations which were frozen by the President, we wanted to give the House an opportunity to say that those items should be provided in this continuing resolution. The President has stonewalled on those $2.5 billion worth of items.

And we also wanted the House to reaffirm its support for $275 million of additional veterans medical care, for $200 million additional funding to fight terrorism in the Middle East, which we would have provided to Israel. The election reform money which both parties posed for political holy pictures about early on, we wanted to provide that. And we are being denied the opportunity to provide all of it. None of that adds to the spending level of the Republican-approved budget resolution. It does add to the level in this bill, but this bill is substantially below that resolution. Yet we are being denied the opportunity to strengthen the homeland security of this country because of the partisan needs of the majority party. I think that is illegitimate.

The other thing we wanted to do is to see to it that the Securities and Exchange Commission is funded at the level promised in the Sarbanes-Oxley bill so that we could in fact put our money where our mouth is and afford investors decent protection from corporate fraud in their balance statements and in their accounting. We are being denied by the Republican majority the opportunity to do that as well.

That is why we are going to be asking this body to vote against the previous question on the rule so that we

can in fact offer this legitimate amendment, to offer these items which all of you, at least 90 percent of you on the majority party side of the aisle have already voted for. The items I am asking people to allow have already been supported by 90 percent of the Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and the House. I do not think that would be too much to ask if this House were a legitimate democratic body, which apparently the House is not. Democracy in this House is being shredded. The Republican Party is simply afraid to vote on these issues because they know that they would either lose the vote or else have a substantial segment of the American people saying to them, ``What in God's name were you thinking when you turned those items down?'' This is an illegitimate action, an illegitimate, arrogant and antidemocratic, small ``d,'' operation, and the majority party ought to be ashamed of themselves.