Floor Statements

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

One minute is hardly time to speak against this bill.

Let me just read a statement that was made by the majority leader a couple of days ago. He commented on the budget that was being passed at the time. He said, ``There is only one person in the United States of America that can stop spending in its tracks, the only person.'' He was referring to the President of the United States and putting a lot of blame, if you will, on the President for not stopping spending that I had argued was going on.

Here we have the President standing up and saying, this bill is bloated; this bill is far too big; it spends far too much. Yet the same people who were blaming the President for not standing up to spending are voting now to override the President when he says enough is enough. This is wrong. We ought to stand up--as Republicans at least, if not the Democrats as well--to stand up and say enough is enough. This bill spends too much, far, far too much.

This bill lacks real reform, overspends, hides its real costs with gimmicks, jeopardizes trade negotiations, increases size and scope of government, and is disservice to taxpayers.

It contains more than $5 billion a year in handouts to millionaire farmers and landowners.

It includes the Average Crop Revenue Election program in the conference report, a program that appears to serve the purpose of ensuring commodity farmers get federal hand-outs even though crop prices are soaring. The details of the potential liability to taxpayers only came out after passage.

Under the supposed salary cap, married farmers could still be making up to $2.5 billion and receive direct payments.

It weakened the payment limit for farm subsidies--lifting the limit on marketing loan benefits and increasing the limit on direct payment benefits.

The gaming of the price support program allows farmers to lock in their loan rate when prices are lowest and sell when prices are highest.

The bill adds target prices for additional crops and increases loan rates and target prices for others.

The brand new and permanent disaster title costs $3.8 billion.

Unfortunately, it includes the extension of marginally reduced ethanol production tax credits and the import tariff--thus continuing the failed federal ethanol program that is responsible at least in part for high food prices plaguing consumers.

The bill includes hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees for the construction of advanced biofuels plants and a Biomass Crop Assistance Program to provide incentives to cellulosic ethanol crops.

This bill forces USDA to sell excess sugar into ethanol production, even though sugar users would continue paying artificially inflated prices ($4 billion or more). (USDA has estimated that ethanol from sugar is twice as expensive to produce [as opposed to corn-based ethanol].)

The bill included disclosed earmarks, plus an undisclosed and airdropped earmark that provides $170 million for commercial and recreational ``members of the fishing communities'' affected by missing salmon, and the ``forestry conservation tax credit bond'' to benefit the Plum Creek timber company.

This bill represents the worst of legislative process: pandering to special interests, dark of night negotiations, airdropped earmarks worth millions of taxpayer dollars, opposition shut out of the floor process, and a $300 billion boondoggle bill.

The cost of the bill is not fully offset: OMB says as much as $20 billion in budget gimmicks and ``illusionary'' spending stops where funding for programs abruptly ends.

Conferees waived PAYGO, and went ``baseline shopping'' (did not use the most current baseline). I have said from the beginning: no way to do a Farm Bill without waiving the PAYGO rules. I was proven right.

The President has rightly vetoed this bill not once but twice. We need House Members to stand up for taxpayers.

Mr. Speaker, flags at the State Capitol in Arizona are flying at half-staff this week to honor the life of Jake Flake.

Jake leaves behind a legacy of service from school boards to irrigation districts to hospital governing boards to the Boy Scouts of America to the Farm Credit Association to countless other organizations. You name it; Jake Flake ran it; raised money for it; rescued it or improved it.

But it was in Arizona's State legislature that he became best known and loved across the State, particularly during his term as Speaker of the House. One of Arizona's last genuine cowboy legislators, his perspective, his insight and his counsel is simply irreplaceable.

To his wife, Mary Louise, Jake was a loving husband. To his 13 children, he was a devoted father. To his 55 grandchildren, he was an adoring grandfather. To his church, he was a faithful servant. To his community, he was a loyal advocate. To his beloved State of Arizona, he was a statesman.

To this lowly Congressman, he was a caring uncle and mentor, and I will miss him dearly.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

It was once said of someone who didn't know exactly where he was going that he was traipsing down a flower-strewn path unpricked by thorns of reason. I don't think there's a better description of what this budget is, than that, traipsing down a flower-strewn path unpricked by thorns of reason.

We were just told the other day, the gentleman from Texas mentioned it, that when you include all unfunded liabilities, not just the national debt out there, but all the money that we promise to pay out, that every American citizen owes something like $500,000. Nearly half a million dollars for every person living. Yet, this budget does nothing to change the course of that.

We will be adding a couple trillion dollars every year in fact that this budget is in place. Over the next 5 years we will go from something like $39 trillion to $52 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

I am not here to defend our record as Republicans when we were here. We did terrible, frankly, in terms of reining in spending. We added a new entitlement program, Medicare part D, which Democrats by and large voted against. If you didn't like it, please repeal it now. Some of us on this side didn't either. But it's bankrupting us and we can't continue to traipse down a flower-strewn path unpricked by thorns of reason.

These budgets have consequences, and the consequence here is we are saddling future generations with untold debt, debt that you can't even contemplate, debt that dwarfs most Americans' personal debt, a mortgage that they pay on a house, that they owe to their Federal Government. Yet we still continue to add program after program, new entitlements, new spending.

Just last week, a huge massive bloated farm bill was passed. Just yesterday, we were getting into construction for school facilities. We can't continue to do this.

Please reject this budget.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, you know, we just heard the gentleman, the majority leader, say the public expects us to act as adults, not as partisan protagonists. That, I certainly hope, is the case. And let me draw attention not to the farm bill portion of the rule but to the defense authorization portion of this rule.

As Members of this body know, over the last couple of years I have brought more than 100 amendments to the floor to strike particular earmarks. Not once, not once on one bill did I target just Democrat earmarks or Republican earmarks. Earmarking is a bipartisan problem. We have a former Member of this body in jail today because we didn't do proper vetting and oversight on earmarks that came through the committee process or just through the appropriations process and then sailed through the floor. That same thing is happening today.

There are more than 500 earmarks in this bill. I'm told that Members of the minority party weren't even given the list during the markup. So there was never any opportunity to challenge those earmarks or to even find out what they are. Now we get the list, and when I submit amendments to be offered to strike the particular earmarks, I'm given one. I offered four: two Democrat earmarks, two Republican earmarks. And the only earmark amendment made in order was one challenging one Republican earmark.

Now, we just heard that the public expects us to act as adults, not as partisan protagonists. I spoke to the majority leader this morning. I asked him to please rectify this problem. I asked him to please just make in order one of the Democratic earmarks. He said he would work at it.

I know this isn't the proper forum. We can't ask for unanimous consent. This is for debate only. But if we really want to act as adults and not partisan protagonists, then we can't treat this earmark debate as a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. It's our problem.

And I would urge a ``no'' vote on the rule unless it's corrected.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

You know, when we pass legislation like this, 1,700 pages, barely have time to print it, let alone read it, we are going to have problems like this. Let me just mention a couple of the problems and issues that have come up over the last couple of days when we have been trying to deal with this legislation.

Our office found out just a couple of days ago after the bill had already passed that there was another subsidy program actually added to the bill during the conference that was not part of the House bill and was not part of the Senate bill. This is potentially a massive, massive liability for the taxpayers. According to the Department of Agriculture, this could mean as much as $16 billion, in addition to everything else in the bill, additional liability for the taxpayers annually.

We don't know much about this program at all. All we know is that for years now the farming community has been upset that they haven't been able to collect money off the countercyclical program and the loan deficiency payment program because prices have been so high. So this new program was put in so the threshold would be much higher at which subsidies kicked in.

The only way this could be scored by the CBO as being compliant with our budget rules is to baseline shop. What that means is instead of taking this year's baseline where we should benchmark our spending off of, it is to go back to last year's baseline. And I believe the information is correct that had we used this year's baseline instead of last year's baseline, CBO informs us that they would have scored this as a $2 billion hit additionally, rather than being scored even, as it is in the bill. I mention this only because this is just another example of what we get when we move with haste like this, when we get a bill that virtually nobody has read.

Now, the things that we know well about the farm bill should give us pause enough. I mentioned before that we face tremendous problems going forward in terms of entitlements and unfunded liabilities. We are, according to USA Today, and we probably get better information there than what we say on this floor, when you include all of our unfunded liabilities and our debt that is out there, it means that every person in America has a debt of about $500,000. Half a million dollars in debt is what we owe when you total unfunded liabilities and our debt.

We simply cannot go forward like this and add a $300 billion bill that pays a farm couple that earns as much as $2.5 million subsidies and continue to pay down the debt. We are simply adding more.

With that, I would urge rejection of this measure.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I just wanted to respond to the statement that was made that we were wrong on the ACRE program in terms of what bills it was in. The ACRE program was not in the House-passed bill. It was in the conference report that passed the House later, is my understanding. It may have been in the Senate bill, but it wasn't a version that ended up in the bill itself.

That is not the information that I had.

And the point that I made with regard to the scoring by CBO stands. If you use an earlier baseline, it affects it tremendously. If you use the baseline that we should be using under the budget rules adopted by this House, by this majority, then the program would not score as it did; it would score as a big hit to the taxpayer rather than something else.

I would like to see it. My information was that it was not in the House bill; and, that if it was in the Senate, it was considerably different than what came over here.

But I think one thing we know is it was not appropriately vetted, because USDA was completely surprised at the numbers that came out. They are the ones, when they are saying all these numbers are flying around, the $16 billion in exposure is from the USDA. It is not pulled from some outside group or some other group, it is the USDA that is saying that this could cost us an additional $16 billion. And that should be considered, and it wasn't in this House; it simply was swept under the rug. That is what happens when you deal with a bill this big this quickly.

Madam Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chairman, I intend to withdraw this amendment after speaking for a few minutes about the process here.

I intended to offer an amendment to strip an earmark in California. It's not that I've had any epiphany on the earmark where I think it's good now. I don't. I think it should not be in this committee report. But I'm not at all happy with the process here.

I submitted a total of five amendments to the Rules Committee. Two amendments were to target earmarks sponsored by Democrats. Two amendments were to target earmarks sponsored by Republicans. One was to uphold the President's executive order with regard to earmarks. When the rule came back from the Rules Committee, only one of the amendments was made in order, one amendment targeting a Republican earmark.

Over the past couple of years, as the Members know, I have come to the floor more than a hundred times to try to strike earmarks. I have tried never to make it a partisan issue. When Republicans were in charge of this body, I sponsored more challenges to Republican earmarks. As the Democrats have taken charge, I've probably sponsored more challenges to Democrat earmarks. But as soon as this becomes a partisan issue, then we lose something here. Earmarks are an institutional issue, an institutional problem here, and we cannot treat it in a partisan fashion. That's why I will be asking for unanimous consent to withdraw this amendment.

But the problem here is that we also didn't allow in the rule the amendment to uphold the President's executive order. The President wisely has recognized that when you don't have earmarks in the bill text, when you're allowed to put them in a committee or conference report, you don't have the scrutiny that you should have on earmarks.

Just take, for example, this bill. This bill has about 500 earmarks. It went through the committee process. The earmarks were added at the last minute. In fact, I am told, at least on the Republican side and I suppose on the Democrat side as well, the rank-and-file members on the committee didn't even know which earmarks were allowed until the markup had happened; so it was impossible to challenge the earmarks while the bill was in committee.

Now, tell me, if we are supposed to be vetting these earmarks, if we're supposed to be looking at them, where are we supposed to do it? It's not happening in the committee process. It's certainly not happening on the floor. So where do we actually look at these?

We have a former Member of this body in jail right now for basically selling earmarks to defense contractors. He used the defense bill, year after year after year, I might add, and there was never a point at which those earmarks were challenged. Nobody looked. In fact, people looked the other way. There were plenty of warning signs out there that these earmarks were untoward. But we looked the other way. I would submit we are doing the same thing today.

When you have a report come to the floor with more than 500 earmarks, none of which were even known to most members of the committee before it arrived here on the floor, and then when I offer amendments to the earmarks, I'm only told I can offer one on the floor, one targeting a Republican earmark, to try to make it a partisan issue, there's something wrong with this picture.

I don't know when we are going to wake up and recognize that earmarks are cheapening this institution, and greatly. In Congress you place value and priorities by appropriating money and authorizing money, but when you have earmarks like this that are slipped in at the last minute out of sight, then you don't get proper debate on these priorities. You basically close your eyes to other people's earmarks because you want to protect your own. And when you have more than 500 earmarks, there are enough to spread around where debate that should be happening on defense priorities or other priorities in other bills is hushed and we simply don't have the scrutiny that these bills deserve.

A lot of these earmarks are, in essence, single-source contracts to private companies. We get all over the administration, and properly so, when they give single-source contracts. Halliburton, how many times have we heard it? We should scrutinize that. We should provide oversight. Yet when one of our Members does it, we turn our backs and say we don't want to know because we might want to do it as well.

Madam Chairman, we have to stop this process.

Madam Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that my amendment be withdrawn.

Will the gentleman yield?

The gentleman has mentioned many projects. I'm sure all of those mentioned would survive the authorization, appropriation, and oversight.

Well, then there's no need to earmark it this way if it's authorized. There's no reason to put it in committee or conference report language and not have it in the bill. I think what the President has rightly recognized is that when it's not in the bill, then there are limited opportunities for other Members to see it and to scrutinize it.

Will the gentleman yield?

There is nothing in the President's executive order that binds

the Pentagon from reprogramming funds. It simply says that the Pentagon may decide to exclude earmarks that it did not request and that aren't in the statute language. I understand the importance of report language.

Will the gentleman yield?

Again, the President's directive doesn't relate to report language in general, it's simply the earmark. Now I just have to say, 500 earmarks in this bill. There will be more than 2,000 when the appropriation bill comes to the floor, if tradition holds. If somebody can make the argument that that is a process worthy of this institution, for more than 2,000 earmarks to come to the floor, and no time, no time--it will come to the floor probably the same day that we vote on it--for this body to appropriately scrutinize it, and for every Predator or worthy earmark that you can point to, you can probably point to a dozen where shirts were earmarked that melt on a soldier's body, but somebody in their district just wanted them.

If the gentleman will yield one more time.

I would simply say that the gentleman mentioned that he believes in disclosure, and if a person puts an earmark in, he should be able to withstand the heat that might come from it. The problem with this process is there's no opportunity for that to happen. I offered four amendments. I was given one. In an appropriations bill of more than 2,000 earmarks, how many can you really do? How many can you challenge.

That is why we have had so many problems over the last couple of years with bad earmarks, is there's simply no way to adequately vet them. There were 36,000 earmark requests before the appropriations committee last year, and no way to vet them.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling).

I yield an additional minute to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, if this represents reform, I would hate to see what the Ag Committee calls a boondoggle. We have here not just a continuation of all the programs we had before, some even at higher levels; we have a new program.

As the gentleman from Wisconsin mentioned, there was an article in the Washington Post today detailing the ACRE program. The ACRE program is a new program where subsidies will kick in at far higher levels than they ever have before. In fact, just take corn, for example. If corn hits $3.50 a bushel, where it was just a year or two ago, at historic highs for the time, if we hit that again, that will trigger subsidies totaling about $10 billion a year, in addition to everything we are doing today.

That is not reform. That is far away from reform, and how somebody can stand up today and with a straight face say this is reform, I just don't know.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, I want to respond to the gentleman from Virginia responding to my statement about the ACRE program and the potential for taxpayer liability here.

The reason that the CBO scored it as a net savings is because of what is called baseline shopping. It was done with this bill, where we actually reached back and chose to base the bill on a baseline, a prior year baseline, when corn prices, when wheat prices, when soybean prices weren't as high. Had we used this year's baseline or this year's projections, then we would see that next year, for example, when this kicks in, that you could have corn at $4.25 a bushel still receiving subsidies.

Now, keep in mind $4.25 is higher than corn has ever been, until this year.

And so dropping back to just what it was before this year will trigger subsidies that would not have been triggered before. That is not reform. That is not reform at all. That is soaking the taxpayers. That is farming the taxpayers rather than the land.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo).

I yield 90 seconds to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Ryan).

I just want to address some of the comments that have been made. It's been said several times that this bill is good because it's a bipartisan bill. If this is the standard by which we judge legislation, then we're doing pretty poorly in this House.

If anybody remembers, just a couple of years ago, the infamous bill that brought us the Bridge to Nowhere. Do you want to know how bipartisan that bill was? I believe it was 412 votes for, 8 votes against. If that isn't bipartisan, what is?

Yet who would want that vote back if they could? 6,300 earmarks, with a lot of bad ones, including the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. And yet we laud legislation simply because it's bipartisan.

I would love to see a lot more partisanship in this House when it comes to fiscal discipline. I wish that my

party, the Republican Party, would stand up and say, anybody who believes in limited government cannot support a bill like this, a $300 billion bill that is bipartisan because so many groups are now involved.

You do a specialty crop title; you add another subsidy program called ACRE, you get biomass in it, you get cellulosic ethanol, you add another nutrition program, and pretty soon you have so many people in it that they don't dare vote against it, and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and pretty soon you have a $300 billion bill that you can only pay for by shopping for a baseline other than this year's baseline, and waive PAYGO requirements. That's why this is a bipartisan bill.

I would hope, in a week where a major news organization published, and I hope it set off some alarm bells here, that not only do we have about 9 or $10 trillion in debt, but when you add in the unfunded liabilities, it adds up to about a half a million dollars per person in this country, the amount of debt and unfunded obligation that we're on the hook for.

If we cannot, in this legislation, tell a farm entity, a farm couple that earns as much as $2.5 million that they can no longer collect farm subsidies, how in the world are you going to tell a grandmother, you're going to have to postpone your retirement for a couple of years because we can't afford your Social Security payment?

How in the world are you going to tell somebody, you know, you're going to have to have a higher copay on Medicare for prescription drugs because we have a big farm bill like this?

We need to be more responsible, and I would urge us to sustain the President's veto.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, Congress recently approved the farm bill and it's now on its way to a Presidential veto. Any farm bill that increases the size and scope of government, lacks real reform, continues to provide for wasteful agricultural subsidies, and even allows millionaires to continue to receive these subsidies, deserves the veto that it's going to get. It also uses a lot of budget gimmicks to get under the level that would allow it to pass in the first place. So I am glad that the President has decided to veto the bill. We should sustain it.

There's another big reason to sustain a Presidential veto of the farm bill. It's recently come to light, and we only know this because we got the final draft of the bill I believe on the day or just the day before that we voted on it so very few of us were able to actually look through it and to see what was in it. One of the programs in it is called the Average Crop Revenue Election, or ACRE program. This will allow farmers starting in 2009 the option of taking a 20 percent reduction in direct payments and other farm supports in return for a Federal guarantee on their revenue.

Now as we talked about during the debate on the farm bill, farmers can receive direct payments that don't relate to the price of commodities at all. They simply receive payments based on acreage that they had way back when. These payments total about $5 billion a year. They should be done away with completely. But they are now seen as an entitlement. We tried and failed to remove those direct payments from the bill. Those are received, as I mentioned, by millionaires. In fact, a couple, a farm couple, husband and wife in farm and nonfarm income, can make as much as $2.5 million and still receive direct payments in this legislation.

If that wasn't enough, this new ACRE program will allow farmers to actually claim subsidies at a level far higher than they used to under the old bill. Under the farm bill, 2002, which was bloated in itself, once crops dropped below a certain price, then some subsidies would kick in. But apparently those prices were too low for this new bill. And so under this new program, at a far higher threshold, new subsidies will kick in.

The Department of Agriculture estimates that if the price of corn drops, for example, to $3.25 per bushel, the program, this new ACRE program that is new to this bill would dole out nearly $10 billion just to corn farmers. If the price of wheat drops to $4.50 a bushel, wheat farmers would be eligible for $2.5 million in assistance. Again, this is assistance above and beyond what we have done in the past, or what the bill calls for, anyway.

This is new money that taxpayers are exposed to. This is a lot of exposure. It's indecent exposure for the taxpayers. If soybeans, for example, drop to about $7 per bushel, that is another $7 billion in assistance that will be going out to farmers. Now CBO's estimate of this program showed a net savings, but that was largely due to being forced to use outdated projections associated with the 2007 baseline.

The bottom line is we have skyrocketing corn, wheat, soybean prices. When we base a new subsidy program off these high level prices, then we are going to kick in a lot more readily than we would have otherwise, and we are going to be paying out a lot more. The taxpayers will be on the hook for a lot more.

These estimates, I think had they been available, had more people been aware of this new subsidy program, I think we would have had a lot more votes against the farm bill. It provides Members with a good reason, even if they voted for the farm bill last week, to sustain the President's veto and say let's go back to the drawing board. We simply cannot, cannot expose the taxpayers to this much subsidy.

Way back when, part of what is driving corn prices so high, for example, are the ethanol subsidies that we are providing. We have been told for decades these were just to prime the pump. Once we get it started, get this program started, we won't need to subsidize ethanol any more. Yet, here again the bill we passed last week subsidizes ethanol heavily. It also imposes tariffs on imported ethanol.

Now I believe that some people are worried that those ethanol subsidies,

because we are learning how much they're increasing the cost of food and how much degradation of the environment is actually being caused by ethanol, that those ethanol subsidies might be going away. This is a way to guarantee money still being paid, regardless of ethanol subsidies, because the cry will be, Well, if we get rid of ethanol subsidies, the price of corn will drop and the taxpayers will be paying anyway if the price drops under this new subsidy program. So this is a way to simply ensure that we are paying subsidies, regardless. We shouldn't be doing so.

We know that the farm bill, the old farm bill that we just replaced, the new farm bill, it pays out unnecessary subsidies, it distorts the free market, it forces farmers to plant where they shouldn't plant and not plant where they should, and it also distorts our international trade obligations and makes it less likely that we can open new markets.

I would urge us, Madam Speaker, to sustain the President's veto of this farm bill.

I thank the gentleman. I just want to make a brief observation here.

We were here yesterday with the farm bill and witnessed the kind of traveling back in time, if you will, to find a baseline to use so that we could comply with PAYGO. So the majority party seems to use PAYGO however it fits their purposes. They will use PAYGO or they will ignore PAYGO or find ways around it by shopping for a baseline that works rather than what the law provides, or they will say we've got to comply with PAYGO today because we need to increase taxes.

So it seems just an observation here that PAYGO is only used as a way not to enforce spending discipline because, if it actually does enforce any discipline, we waive it, but if it's used to increase taxes, then, by golly, we've got to enforce it.

I just don't see how one day can make such a big difference if this wasn't the case.

Mr. Speaker, I didn't plan to take any time today, but we will be debating the farm bill later today, and the rule that has come to the floor does not allow anyone to claim time in opposition to the bill; so those of us who are opposed to this $300 billion piece of legislation cannot even stand up and oppose the bill unless we get time, if they are generous enough to give it to us, from those who support the bill. Now, if I were wanting to hide what's in this bill, that's what I would do too.

This legislation allows multimillionaires to still collect farm subsidies. Under this legislation you can still make $2.5 million as a couple in farm and nonfarm income and still collect subsidies. I would have a closed rule or a highly structured rule as well if I had this in a bill and wanted to hide it.

This bill needs to be rejected today. I hope we will all vote against the farm bill.

Mr. Speaker, I raise a point of order against H. Res. 1189 because the resolution violates section 426(a) of the Congressional Budget Act. The resolution contains a waiver of all points of order against consideration of the conference report which includes a waiver of section 425 of the Congressional Budget Act which causes a violation of section 426(a).

Mr. Speaker, I raise this point of order realizing that it is a bit of a stretch. The reason that we have this point of order in law is to guard against unfunded mandates being levied on the States. In this case, there are a lot of unfunded mandates being heaped upon taxpayers. I realize, as I said, this is a stretch. But I have to do this today because the rule that is before us does not allow anybody opposed to the bill to claim time in opposition to the bill.

Now how is it that a bill of this import, a bill that will spend over the next 10 years about $300 billion, is not important enough to allow those who are opposed to the bill to claim time in opposition to it? Instead, the structured rule before us today allows time to be split between the majority and the minority. Now those who will be controlling that time are people who are in support of the bill. How is it that we can discuss a bill this large, this important, that spends this much money, and that heaps this kind of burden on the taxpayer, yet again, without having a real discussion?

When we have a bill before the House, we have time called ``general debate.'' In this case, general debate is between those in the majority who support the bill and those in the minority who support the bill. Now how is that debate? Why is it that the Rules Committee can't see fit to actually allow people who are opposed to the bill to claim time in opposition to it?

With that, I would love to hear an explanation from the Rules Committee why we have a structured rule that does this.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Again, I realize this bill has been in discussion for a couple of years. And I will come to that a little later as we talk about why earmarks had to be airdropped into the bill at the last minute. If we have been discussing this bill for 2 years, then couldn't we actually discuss these earmarks that were to be added to the bill instead of airdropping them into the conference report when nobody in the House or nobody in the Senate had even seen them? So it is hardly a defense to say that we have been discussing this for 2 years, nor is it a reason to deny those who are opposed to the bill an opportunity to actually claim time in opposition.

Let me read from the House rules. If the floor manager for the majority and the floor manager for the minority both support the conference report or a motion, one-third of the time for debate thereon shall be allotted to a Member, Delegate or Resident Commissioner who opposes the conference report or motion on demand of that Member, Delegate or Resident Commissioner.

We waived that. And we are not doing it. And let me tell you why I think that is the case. Now if I were supporting this bill, and I had been touting this bill as some big reform to our farm programs, I would flat be plumb embarrassed to bring this bill to the floor in its current form. I would be embarrassed.

What has got most of the attention, the problem that we all note, that everybody across the country realizes, is how in the world can we have a situation where multimillionaire farmers are collecting subsidies courtesy of the taxpayer?

And the real effort in here, what the President wanted, what others wanted, and what many of us here in the House argued for, was to put a cap on how much income you can have and still receive subsidies. The President suggested $200,000 adjusted gross income.

Remember, adjusted gross income is your income minus expenses. All of us here collect a salary of about $169,000. By the time we deduct things for mortgage interest, medical expenses and charitable contribution, it brings that down by at least one-third, maybe even one-half. Under this legislation, a farm couple can have farm income and nonfarm income totaling $2.5 million and still receive direct payments under this legislation.

Now, if I were bringing a bill to the floor and had touted this bill as reforming, man, I would want to hide that as well. I would not want somebody to be able to stand up and say, how is it that a multimillionaire farm couple can still collect subsidies from the taxpayers? So I commend the Rules Committee and those who are in support of the bill for actually putting a rule together that minimizes opposition that can be raised and that the only way people can stand up and oppose and be guaranteed time in opposition is to use a maneuver like raising a point of order against the bill.

I should mention there are other problems with this and other reasons why this rule should not go forward. We are waiving PAYGO rules. Now one thing the majority said when they came into power is we will not waive PAYGO. We are going to live by PAYGO. When we give money out, we have to make sure that that many money is in the Treasury or we won't do it.

This waives PAYGO because there is simply no way you can be in compliance with PAYGO and pass a $300 billion farm bill. And in this case, the writers of the legislation did something very creative. They actually went baseline shopping. What PAYGO says is that you have to take the current baseline, the most current baseline of spending, and total up your spending in the bill based on that current baseline.

Instead, what the authors of this legislation did was said, oh, let's go to last year's baseline because we spent less money then and it means we can spend more money in this legislation. Baseline shopping. It is as if I were to say, I don't want to pay so much in taxes this year. So I am going to use last year's wages that I was paid, and I am going to report that instead. Now if I did that, I would be thrown in jail. But we are allowed to do this here. We are allowed to say, we will take whatever baseline we want as long as it allows us to spend more money in the legislation. And then when the bill comes to the floor, we will just waive the rule that required us to be honest in terms of bringing legislation that complies with PAYGO.

I would love an explanation from the Rules Committee as to why PAYGO was waived in this regard.

And I would reserve the balance of my time.

May I inquire as to the time remaining.

I will gladly yield to my colleague from California on the Rules Committee for a question.

Did we waive the PAYGO rules in this rule?

Reading from the House rules after the beginning of a new calendar year----

I can well understand why the other side does not want to talk about PAYGO and why I should confine this debate to unfunded mandates because PAYGO was, in fact, waived here. PAYGO was waived. And were it not waived, it would be subject to a point of order, the same point of order that the gentleman is lodging against this debate right now. So I can understand that. And I guess we will have to go with the flow.

There is another point of order that will be raised shortly with regard to the waiver of the earmark rules that we have in place as well.

So let me get back. This is an unfunded mandate on the taxpayers, of course. According to the Environmental Working Group, the Federal Government handed out $13.4 billion in farm subsidies to 1.4 million recipients, $11.2 billion of which related to various commodity support programs, programs that the underlying bill simply does not change.

The taxpayers have a huge unfunded mandate here that we are going to be paying off for a very, very long time.

With that I will gladly yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind).

Mr. Speaker, I raise a point of order against H. Res. 1189 under clause 9 of rule XXI, because the resolution contains a waiver of all points of order against the conference report and its consideration.

Mr. Speaker, this second point of order, and I will be calling for a vote on this one, is raised because of earmarks that have been airdropped into the legislation.

As the gentleman mentioned, this is not a new bill. This is not something that just popped up last week and that there was a need to add $1 million for the National Sheep and Goat Industry Improvement Center, but that was something that had to come up at midnight and be dropped in when nobody had seen it in either the House or the Senate.

This bill has been under consideration for a long, long time, and yet, still, we have earmarks that have been airdropped into the legislation, a number of them. Now, the gentleman may say in defense, we have listed the earmarks that have been airdropped in.

It is true that some have been listed. If all of them were listed, why would we waive all points of order against the bill? If the majority was confident enough that all earmarks have been listed, then we wouldn't have waived the points of order against it. I will speak specifically about a few of these earmarks.

But let me just mention some of them that are in the bill. There is authorization language for a National Products Research Laboratory. Again, this was airdropped in at the last minute when it hadn't been in the House version of the bill, hadn't been in the Senate, it was airdropped into the conference report. There is authorization language for a Policy Research Center, authorization language for Housing Assistance Council.

Now, what that has to do with the farm bill, I am not sure, and the problem is, we will never know until the bill was passed because it was airdropped in at the last minute.

That's the problem that the majority party correctly identified when they took control of this body, that we have a problem with earmarks, and they are being dropped in at the last minute without notice.

That's why decent rules were actually put in place to try to curb this abuse. The problem is, in this rule, we are waiving those rules. We are waiving those rules so the old practice can continue on just like it always has.

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

Mr. Speaker, I find it ironic that we are being accused on this side of trying to stifle debate on the bill, that we don't want debate on the bill when I am here to argue against a rule that waives these points of order and a rule that also does not allow opposition to claim time.

Now, the majority will say, well, we will yield you time now. Now that we have been caught on this, we will yield you some time. That's not the same as controlling time.

When I control time, I can yield time to my colleagues. If I am yielded time, I can't do that. I don't control time in opposition.

Our House Rules say that if both the majority and the minority are in favor of the bill for the leadership, that somebody opposed to the bill has a right to claim time in opposition.

That was not done here. With a bill this important, you wonder why that has happened.

Back to the earmarks, the gentleman mentioned that there is a list of earmarks that was listed, it's right here, a number of them. Now why in the world we had to have more than a dozen earmarks airdropped into a bill that has been under consideration for the past 2 years, I simply don't know.

But when you read some of them, you kind of wonder why, like I said, Housing Assistance Council, Sun Grant Insular Pacific Sub-Center, Desert Terminal Lakes, Nevada. This is all we know about them.

If you dig into them, you might find something untoward, you might not, but the fact is we don't have time to do that. That's why we have earmark rules that give us time to actually vet them. Those rules are being waived here, and we should not be doing that.

Let me mention also, the gentleman said they are all listed. They aren't. There is quite a controversial earmark in this legislation that does not show up on the list. It's a $250 million tax refund to the Plum Tree Timber Company. Now, this is an earmark that allows the Nature Conservancy to purchase that from the Plum Tree Timber Company.

Now, the Plum Tree Timber Company, as I understand, is not mentioned in the legislation, it is simply described. It would be like saying I am going to give a subsidy to the gentleman who stands 6-feet tall, weighs 175 pounds, has blue eyes and his middle name is John, but we won't say the rest of it.

That's exactly what we are doing here. In an effort to get around the scrutiny that might come if somebody actually said now why is a subsidy actually going to the Plum Tree Timber Company.

It is no wonder that the rules have been waived here. If I had something like this in this bill, I would waive the rules too, because I wouldn't want anybody to talk about it. I would also not want anybody who is opposed to the bill to claim time in opposition to it.

If I were sponsoring this legislation that I said reformed the farm subsidy program to make sure that multimillionaire farmers don't continue to get subsidies on behalf of the taxpayer, I would hide it as well. I would do exactly what the Rules Committee has done here and the supporters of the legislation have done.

Because under this legislation, a farm couple earning as much as $2.5 million in adjusted gross income, that's your income after expenses are taken out, can still receive direct payments under this legislation.

Also, the other subsidy programs, rather than reform or to get rid of the loopholes that were allowing people to get extra subsidies, we simply waive the limits there. This is called reform?

I mean, is it any wonder that the rules have been waived and debate has been stifled here on this critical legislation?

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

The gentleman mentioned the National Marine Fishery Service earmark. It was added at the last minute. It may have been in a 2006 bill, but it wasn't in this bill until it was air dropped into the conference report. Now $170 million, that may well be a disaster there, but why in the world, if it is a disaster, why isn't it covered?

I would.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for the clarification. I still would point out we have a $3.8 billion permanent disaster title added to the bill; and still, in addition to that, we are funding these kinds of programs directly and specifically.

The gentleman can argue that it is not an earmark. I think that a casual or a tortured reading of this would both say this is an earmark when you are naming a specific entity to receive a specific amount of money and when it wasn't in the House bill, that is an earmark. So there is a good reason for this point of order.

The gentleman said, and let me go back to the PAYGO issue. The gentleman mentioned that this rule he thinks is in compliance with PAYGO. Let me read what this conference report says and see if anybody can decipher this.

If I might respond, the gentleman, after he raised his last point of order went on to talk about the reforms in the bill which clearly didn't have anything to do with the unfunded mandates language that I had raised or that I had talked about or that he had raised a point of order for. Clearly, I understand that they don't want to talk about this. I understand that. That's why the rules are waived. But to stand now and to raise a point of order against my point of order because I am not addressing specifically the question that they want to address or that they would rather dispose of is, I think, a little spurious.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I thank the other side. You notice the words used, that we have graciously agreed to give them. Under the rules, the House rules, those who are opposed to the bill are required to be given the chance to claim time in opposition, not to be at the whims and graciousness of those who support the legislation. That's why we have rules, and that's why in this case the rules have been waived.

I understand completely if I had waived the PAYGO rules, when so many on that side of the aisle, bless their hearts, have been diligent sometimes on raising the issue of PAYGO and saying we shouldn't violate it, if I had violated PAYGO and waived it like this, I would want to waive every rule as well and stifle all the debate I could because it is embarrassing, frankly.

I don't have time to yield.

I would just say in my remaining 15 seconds, we have a bill that deserves a lot more debate than it is getting. This is important legislation. We are waiving PAYGO rules, and let me just say what this rule says: Therefore, while there is a technical violation of clause 10 of rule XXI, the conference report complies with the rule. It says there is a technical violation, but we have complied. It simply doesn't make sense.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, we've detailed many of the problems with this rule, one of the worst aspects of which is that, as has been mentioned, it allows a bit of time travel here for the purpose of going back and choosing another baseline that allows you to actually comply with PAYGO rules. That should not be allowed under the rule, and that's why the PAYGO rules are actually waived in this bill. For all the talk on the other side about PAYGO compliance, if this bill was PAYGO compliant, the PAYGO rule would not have been waived.

The same goes with earmarks. More than a dozen earmarks were added, airdropped into the bill; yet we still have a waiver because we know there are likely other earmarks added in the bill as well. So we want to protect against that.

Also, I mentioned about the rule. It stifles debate. I don't know of another example where a conference report has come to the floor, particularly one of this magnitude, where those who are opposed to the bill have not been given the opportunity to claim time in opposition. Instead, we have to rely on the good graces of those who support the bill to actually be yielded time to actually speak in opposition to the bill.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, we have a real problem in this country in terms of entitlements. We're going to have to reform Social Security and Medicare. Tell me how, tell me why anybody out there, outside of the beltway, should believe that we are capable of doing that kind of reform when we can't tell a farm couple making up to $2.5 million in adjusted gross income every year, that's income after expenses, if we can't tell them that the subsidy party is over? How are we ever going to reform entitlements? I asked that of my party; I ask that of the Democrats. How in the world can anybody take us seriously here if we can't have a farm bill that reforms the subsidy program?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, sometimes here in Washington, we tend to drink our own bath water and believe our own press releases. And to hear some of the debate here, you would think this is the best bill in the world and that everybody out there has got to support it.

Let me just read a couple of editorials from around the country to give you an idea of how this bill is being played outside of Washington:

The Columbus Dispatch: ``The current compromise version of the farm bill includes little retreat from the subsidy program that for decades has bled taxpayers, fattened the already fat, distorted market incentives, soured U.S. trade, hurt the environment, and done little for family farmers.''

The San Francisco Chronicle: ``From the fiscal watchdog perspective, this bill is a sign that the new Democratic leadership is as profligate as the Republican leadership it replaced. Make that more profligate . . . The $286 billion farm bill is good politics only because the millions of taxpayers who are paying the bill are not pushing as hard as the relatively few who benefit.''

The Albany Times: ``Corn prices are up. Same for flour. That means farmers are enjoying boom times . . . So why would Congress even think of giving more generous subsidies?'' That's a good question.

The Spartanburg Herald-Journal: `` . . . The fact that reform has failed, and Congress is about to pass a renewal of the same failed, wasteful subsidies, is a testament to all that's wrong with politics in Washington . . . Congress has reached a House/Senate compromise bill that will continue to take money from you and other families struggling with high food prices to further enrich big corporate farmers who are already earning record prices for their crops.''

The Dallas Morning News: ``The legislators negotiating the new farm bill evidently don't do their own grocery shopping. Otherwise, they'd have seen the dramatic rise in food prices. And they'd have done more than trim only $400 million from the $26 billion in direct-payment subsidies they're planning for farmers . . .''

We can do a lot better than this. I want to associate myself with the comments of Mr. Kind from Wisconsin. Taxpayers expect more.

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

Mr. Speaker, I will yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Hulshof).

I yield 1 minute to the minority leader, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner).

I yield myself 1 minute.

We have mentioned the generous subsidies that still flow to multimillionaire farmers. Let me just put that in perspective in this legislation. With this legislation, a farm couple earning $2.5 million in combined on-farm and off-farm income is still eligible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in farm payments. Yet an urban couple earning a little more than $17,800 or owning more than one vehicle can become ineligible for food stamp benefits.

Now I am not making an argument that we should raise the threshold for food stamp benefits. But look at the difference here. How in the world can you justify having a farm couple with on-farm and off-farm income of $2.5 million still eligible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies? It is simply indefensible.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, in my very short time remaining, let me simply say that we have a huge problem with entitlements in this country, one of which is the entitlement, direct payment system for farmers. This is not serious reform, when you are still paying farmers that make up to $2.5 million in subsidies from the taxpayer.

I urge a ``no'' vote on the bill.

Madam Speaker, tomorrow we're going to be voting on a very important piece of legislation. This is the farm bill, something that we reauthorize every 5 years or so, and I would

have hoped that we could have a good debate tomorrow. But I just learned a few minutes ago that the bill will come to the floor under a structured rule which will not allow anybody opposed to the bill to claim time in opposition.

So, if you can believe this, this is one of the most expensive, most important pieces of legislation to come before this body in years, and it will come to the floor under a structured rule that does not allow those opposed to the rule to claim time in opposition. This is a bill that the President has said that he will veto. This is a bill that has opposition. But those who favor this farm bill do not want those who oppose the bill to be heard. Imagine that.

There is time under the rule, as with any bill that comes to the floor, for what's called general debate. If you can think of this, general debate tomorrow will mean that time will simply be split between the majority party, which favors the bill, and those on the minority party who also favor the bill. If you oppose the bill, you cannot claim time in opposition, and you must go and get time, which you may or may not be able to get from your respective party officials or those who are controlling the time.

That is simply wrong. We shouldn't run the House this way, under Republicans or Democrats. A bill of this importance should be debated, should be debated fully.

Let me explain a few parts of the bill that I think led to the decision to make this a structured rule where those opposed to the bill cannot claim time in opposition.

We have said we had heard that we were going to have some reform in this farm bill. Those who are on farms making millions of dollars on farms in the past have been able to claim massive subsidies. We were told that this was going to change. In fact, what the President said is that we should have a limit of $200,000 adjusted gross income, or AGI. Anything above that and you should not be able to receive subsidies. That sounds reasonable.

But instead, in this piece of legislation, you can make in farm income $750,000 in adjusted gross income. As an individual, a single farmer can make that. Remember, that's adjusted gross income. That's your income minus expenses. That's after all expenses are taken out. You can still make as a single farmer $750,000 and receive subsidies. If you're married and you structure it properly, your spouse can also make $750,000. That means you can have adjusted gross income as a couple of $1.5 million and still receive thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidy payments from your government.

What's more, if you're a farmer and the farmer's spouse making up to $1.5 million in adjusted gross income, if you have non-farm income, that can amount to $500,000 in addition, and then if your spouse has non-farm income, that's another $500,000. So you can have a couple making $2.5 million in adjusted gross income. Again, adjusted gross income is your income minus your expenses.

People will point out farming's an expensive venture. There are a lot of expenses, but those are taken out, and you can still have adjusted gross income of $2.5 million and collect subsidies under this bill. Is it any wonder that those who favor this farm bill didn't want anybody to be able to claim time in opposition to the bill tomorrow when we debate it?

A few other things that should be discussed here. I should mention that over the past couple of years, since we passed the last farm bill, farm incomes have shattered all kinds of records. We have net farm income that will reach $92.3 billion in 2008. That's a 56 percent increase over 2006.

Average household farm income significantly exceeds the national average. In fact, average household income for farmers is $89,434. Why do we have these kind of subsidies for those who are far better off than the average American? It simply doesn't make sense.

There are also some pretty severe budget gimmicks in this bill to make it look like it's coming in under budget when it really isn't. The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, identified numerous gimmicks in both the House and the Senate versions of the bill that, for example, they shift costs outside the 10-year window and unrealistically assume that some of these programs will be ended in 5 years, and we know that they won't, just to fit them under the budget window.

Also under this legislation, for the first time that I've seen this, those writing the bill were able to go baseline shopping where you basically say I don't like this year's baseline funding or baseline limit so I'm going to go off last year's baseline limit; that will allow me to spend more. It's like if I were filling out my taxes and I said, well, you know, I could pay less if I claimed last year's income instead of this year's and I would be able to choose that.

That's what the sponsors of this legislation have done. They've shopped for a cheaper baseline so they could fit more spending. That gimmick should be exposed, and it's no wonder they didn't want anybody to claim time in opposition.

Madam Speaker, I don't know how anybody in America thinks that we're going to be serious enough to address the entitlement problem we have in this country with Social Security and Medicare if we can't say no to millionaire farmers. How will we ever address entitlements if we can't say no to millionaire farmers?

Mr. Speaker, many of us in this body have realized for quite a while that the practice of earmarking is out of control. When we herald the fact that we had a mere 12,000 earmarks last year, as opposed to only 15,000 a couple of years ago, we know that something is wrong.

But the exercise we went through last week was perhaps the best indication we had yet that we still have a long way to go. We authorized the Justice Department to investigate the origin of an immaculate earmark, an earmark that wasn't in either the House or Senate version of the bill, that only showed up when the President signed the legislation. The earmark was not in either the House or Senate version. Now, one would think that the discovery of an immaculate earmark would prompt an immediate congressional investigation. Instead, we waited 2 years and then authorized the Justice Department to look into it.

Mr. Speaker, we owe this great institution far better than we're giving it, from bridges to nowhere to teapot museums, to immaculate earmarks that we don't even pass, let alone scrutinize. We can do far better than this.