Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I stand in opposition to the GIVE Act. I think that it has as its premise that we won't have volunteerism in America unless we pay for it somehow or unless this body comes up with it. The volunteerism represented by AmeriCorps and the other programs here represent, I would venture, about one hundredth of 1 percent of all of the voluntary activity that goes on out there. But here we act as if it won't happen unless we create it and pay for it.

Paid volunteerism is not a very good principle, in my view. We have to remember we are running a deficit. Our Federal Government is running a deficit. So any money we pay here, any increase in any programs, any new authorization, which I think over the 5-year reauthorization is about $4.1 billion more than we were paying before, that's money that has to be borrowed from the Treasury and, in effect, borrowed from our kids.

And I think it's prudent to ask what this is going to be used for. I think that most people would be surprised to learn that this legislation would expand and reauthorize programs that the Office of Management and Budget has rated as inefficient and ineffective. For example, the Learn and Serve Program was rated as not performing and results not demonstrated by the OMB. The AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps was rated as not performing and ineffective.

It's bad enough that we are continuing funding, but under the Learn and Serve Program, that was rated again by the OMB as not performing and results not demonstrated, we are actually creating a new program within that and funding it with 20 million more dollars. That simply is not a prudent use of taxpayer dollars.

We have to remember we are taking money from people who are working and giving it to others who are supposedly volunteering to work. When you are providing a financial incentive, be it defrayment of tuition costs or anything else, you are paying people to volunteer.

I would urge my colleagues to reject this legislation and return to fiscal sanity and a little more fiscal discipline in this House.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring another aspect for sustaining the President's veto that hasn't been talked about yet.

When this bill was brought to the floor initially, there were some 26 earmarks in the legislation. First we were told there are no earmarks. Then we had kind of a wild goose chase up in the intelligence room to find if there were. We found out there actually were. Then we finally got a list, belatedly. We got the list of earmarks, I think, about 5 hours after the deadline for us to submit a list of earmarks that we wanted to challenge. How convenient was that?

And we were told, No, it is just procedural, but too late. You won't be able to offer any amendments. We were told at the beginning of the process this year that every earmark that was offered in a piece of legislation in a conference report, in a committee report would be able to be challenged on the House floor. That wasn't the case here. We had 20-some earmarks worth about $80 million that were never challenged that still, to this day, cannot, have not, will not be challenged by this House.

So that, for the process alone, we shouldn't go forward with this piece of legislation.

These weren't just any earmarks. One, $80 million worth; and, two, there were big earmarks like $23 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center. This is a center that the President has been trying to shut down for years because it doesn't coordinate efforts as it should. It gets, I think, about $39 million in the underlying bill and another $21 million in earmarked money in this piece of legislation. That's $23 million in taxpayer dollars in this piece of legislation. That's $62 million in taxpayer funding for an entity that the President and the executive branch want to close down, but it happens to be in the district of a particular powerful Member, so it stays. Again, we weren't able to challenge that.

That led, as we all know, to an altercation on the House floor between a few Members, a privileged resolution that was offered, but still, that earmark remains. All of these earmarks that still haven't been able to be challenged by the House remain in this piece of legislation.

Mr. Speaker, if there was ever, ever a case study in why we need an earmark moratorium, it is this piece of legislation that we are dealing with right now. No matter what you do, the earmarks remain. We even had a motion to instruct offered by my colleague from Michigan to take the earmarks in this bill out, remove them because they haven't been challenged, and they weren't brought to the floor in the proper manner.

That motion to instruct passed with a vote of 249 votes in favor. A sufficient number of Republicans and a significant number of Democrats voted for that motion to instruct to take the earmarks out, but here we are with this piece of legislation here again today, and every one of those earmarks still remains. You can't take them out.

We have to have a moratorium on earmarks so we can address this process. You can have good rules. And I commended the Democrats when they put the rules in place in January of this year. I mentioned that I thought that they were, in fact, a little stronger than what we, as Republicans, had put there. Having said that, rules are only as good as your willingness to enforce them, and the rules were not enforced here.

Again, this legislation came to the floor with earmarks that we were never able to challenge, that came after the deadline when we were to submit the list to challenge. And then the House acted, we acted to address, and with a clear, sufficient majority said, let's take the earmarks out. But still they remained.

I urge us all to sustain the President's veto of this legislation.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, Ronald Reagan once said, ``No matter how big or powerful government gets and the many services it provides, it can never take the place of volunteers.'' I believe that wholeheartedly. But listening to the debate today, you might easily conclude that volunteerism wasn't discovered until Congress discovered it, and that the only meaningful service that anyone can provide is in a program sponsored by government. We all know that that is simply not the case.

In truth, the programs that are being talked about today, the government-sponsored programs, make up probably less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of all the volunteer activity that takes place across this country. But when we have community service and volunteer positions, when we end up financing them or providing incentives from government, it becomes just another government service.

The new Summer of Service grant program created by this legislation gives incentives to community service work in the form of financial benefits at taxpayer expense. The amendment that I am offering today would simply strike all the language in the bill relating to the so- called Summer of Service program and reduce the authorization by $20 million. This is the amount designated to the program.

The new Summer of Service program would award $20 million annually for education awards for volunteer positions in which school-aged participants can earn up to $1,000 for completion of a 100-hour community-based service-learning project.

Now, we are all familiar with volunteer service that goes on: churches, Rotary Clubs, Boy Scout organizations. In fact, this weekend, 2 days from now, my own son will be doing his Eagle project. He will provide up to 30 hours of service himself, and more than 100 hours will be provided by people that he has recruited to help him in his project. This kind of activity goes on every day, every minute of every day, every second of every day. And yet, we feel that we have to have new and more government programs somehow to prompt volunteer service. That, I think, sells people across this country short. People can volunteer on their own and do without benefits provided by government.

I reserve the balance of my time.

May I inquire as to the time remaining on my side.

Mr. Chairman, this $20 million program is being authorized under the Learn and Serve program. I would be glad to yield 30 seconds to the sponsor of this program or to the committee if I can find out if they actually studied whether this program is working as it is. It doesn't seem they are near the microphone, so I will read something from the Office of Management and Budget.

The Office of Management and Budget audited this program a while ago under the Learn and Serve program. The Learn and Serve program was audited to be not performing, results not demonstrated. The AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps, not performing. Ineffective. This is our own government telling us what our own programs are doing, and yet here we are under the Learn and Serve program authorizing $20 million more for a new program without trying to go in and actually fix the old program or eliminate the old program.

We in Congress sometimes wonder why our authorizing committees are sometimes neglected. This is why. This is why. This program, the whole AmeriCorps program hasn't been reauthorized I think since 1996 or so; and yet, when we do come to reauthorize it, we ignore what our own government, our own agencies are telling us about these programs and we simply pile more money on.

No matter what we do on the overall bill, and I can read the writing on the wall, the bill is going to pass, let's at least give some thought to the taxpayers here who have to fund this, to say that we are not going to increase a program to create a new program under an existing program that has been rated by our own Office of Management and Budget as not performing, results not demonstrated.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Speaker, I respectfully request the opportunity to record my position on rollcall votes 43, 44, and 45. I was regrettably absent from the chamber on February 12 during rollcall votes 43, 44, and 45. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall 43, ``yea'' on rollcall 44, and ``yea'' on rollcall 45.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, as was mentioned, you could easily say that there are unfunded mandates in the bill. You could also say there is a particular earmark in the bill. Because the bill didn't go through regular order and we don't have a committee report to go along with it, there was not a certification that came saying that there were no earmarks in the bill.

Of particular concern is a provision that would allow New York City to keep up to $2 billion worth of the employer share of payroll taxes and invest the funds in a transportation project. This is not the first time we have seen this. The New York Liberty Zone Tax Credit earmark was included in a previous energy bill passed by the House, but it was removed by the Senate.

Now, I think we can all quibble about where the benefits go on some of these things, but it's clear that the target here is New York City. It's a targeted tax provision, and it's what we typically refer to as an earmark in the authorizing bill. And I would say that if it looks like an earmark and acts like an earmark, it is one. And it shouldn't be in this bill unless there is some kind of certification or something that is not an earmark. I just don't know how you can call it anything but that. This is just another example of how little impact Congress's steps to reform the process have actually had in the day-to-day operation of the House.

For a point of order against an earmark to be rejected, the chairman needs to simply insert a statement into the Record saying there are no earmarks in the bill, and then the point of order can't be lodged. Here we don't even have that kind of statement, and still we are saying a point of order can't be lodged in this regard.

So I would say that we ought to reject this bill for many reasons, not the least of which it's going to blow a $2 billion hole in the budget here for a limited specific tax provision benefiting only one group across the country.

With that, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Madam Speaker, just 2 days ago, we witnessed a transition of power in Cuba. It is no surprise that the new government in Cuba looks a lot like the old. It's time for a get-tough policy on Cuba. It's time to end the isolation that has been both a friend and an enabler to decades of oppression. This isolation has given the Cuban Government a convenient scapegoat for the failure of socialism. We should not give Raul Castro the same benefits that we gave his brother Fidel. We cannot continue to be the Goliath to their David.

For too long, U.S. policy toward Cuba has missed the island by about 90 miles. Our Cuba policy, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has been more about Florida than about Cuba, more about securing votes in Miami than securing the right to vote in Havana.

Madam Speaker, we are too great a country than to deny Cuban American families the right to visit family members in Cuba. We are too great a country than to deny our own citizens the right to travel to the island and to give aid and comfort to those who have endured decades of oppression.

Freedom in Cuba is a worthy goal, a goal that would perhaps be more easily achieved if we practice a little more of it ourselves.

Madam Speaker, we have always been fortunate to have in this body of legislators Members who, for lack of a better term, are called ``institutionalists.'' These are Members on both sides of the aisle who understand and appreciate the fact that this institution will outlive all of us and that we should try to ensure that when we leave the Congress, we leave the institution better than we found it.

Madam Speaker, we desperately need these institutionalists to stand up today and play a role in reforming the practice of earmarking that is beneath the dignity of this great institution.

It is almost a daily occurrence that we wake up to newspaper articles detailing questionable earmarks that coincide with large campaign contributions, earmarks that face little or no scrutiny in this body, earmarks that were more intended to garner votes or contributions than to address legitimate needs.

We have also seen little inclination on the part of those currently in the

position of leadership on either side of the aisle to address this issue in a meaningful way. We have changed the parties in charge, but we haven't changed the practice.

So the mantle falls on the institutionalists among us to foster this change, those who deep down know that we owe more to this institution than we are giving it.

It is time to stand up and be counted.

Madam Speaker, one of my astute colleagues recently said, ``One of the toughest parts of being a Member of Congress is remembering what we are supposed to be outraged about.'' I thought about this yesterday when I heard the report that surprise, surprise, earmarks were being used to help Members get reelected. The reason that is treated with kind of a ho-hum is because, as it turns out, that is one of the more noble explanations as to why earmarks are used.

With the reporting that is going on about earmarks being tied to campaign contributions, or chairmen, or people in leadership positions getting tens of millions of dollars in earmarks for favored companies or organizations in their district, it seems that we have simply gone too far when we don't recognize this as a problem.

I would call on my colleagues in the new year to have a moratorium on earmarks. Let's put a brake on this process until we can put a process in place to adequately vet these. There is no noble purpose for the contemporary practice of earmarking. Try as we might, we aren't coming up with one.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I oppose this rule that will allow this omnibus to be brought to the floor. We had some discussion yesterday, and it should continue today, about the over 9,000 earmarks that are in this bill. It was mentioned by the majority leader yesterday, or the day before. He said, ``Having said that,'' in justification for bringing this bill forward, when it was pointed out that many of these earmarks had been brought to the floor for the first time with this bill, he said, ``this bill incorporates all of the bills that passed this House. This is not as if these are items of first impression. These are bills that we considered in this House and passed with essentially overwhelming bipartisan votes.''

That is only partly true. Yes, these bills, many of them were brought to the House before. A few of them left the House earmark-free. One of them, the Department of Homeland Security bill, we were told we can let this one go and not have the earmarks added because it isn't traditionally earmarked. Guess what? There are more than 100 earmarks that have now been air-dropped into that bill. We are sitting today with hundreds, literally hundreds of earmarks that have been air- dropped into the bill that we have never seen before yesterday. Never seen before yesterday, or Monday, I should say. That is simply wrong.

Let me give you just a couple of examples. There was $1.6 million for the City of Bastrop, Louisiana. According to the Bastrop Daily Enterprise, ``The money is officially earmarked for the purchase of bulletproof vests and body armor. Bulletproof vests only cost about $700 to $800, however, so $1.6 million would appear to be overkill.'' Police Chief Curtis Stephenson agrees, conceding, ``There's no way we need that kind of money just to put all our people in vests.'' Again, this was an earmark for bulletproof vests for the police officers in this city, and the city comes back and says, We don't have that many police officers.

We are told that these earmarks are vetted. How are they vetted? The answer is they are really not. They are not vetted by that party; they aren't vetted by this party. It's more of a game of ``Can you catch me with my hand in the cookie jar or not?''

Earlier this year, when I was challenging a couple of earmarks on the floor, one Member who had one of the earmarks I was going to challenge beat me to the floor to withdraw his own earmark because he didn't want the scrutiny that would come if that earmark were publicly debated. Later that same week, the Appropriations Committee, when they found out certain other earmarks might be challenged on the floor, called the Rules Committee and struck some other earmarks that were to be debated on the House floor because they couldn't withstand the scrutiny. That isn't vetting. That is hoping that your hand isn't caught in the cookie jar.

Now we have this bill today with over 9,000 of these earmarks. Now, the majority will say, Hey, that is a 17 percent reduction in the number of earmarks in our worst year. Put another way, that's like saying, You know, last year I smoked five packs a day and I am down to three this year. I darn-well quit. That is hardly something to pat ourselves on the back about.

Put another way, we have just 17 percent fewer earmarks than the worst year in congressional history for earmarking. Please don't use this side of the aisle as a bar with which to judge yourselves. That is a bar that a snake could crawl over. We didn't handle ourselves well in the majority with regard to earmarks. That is one of the big reasons we find ourselves in the minority today. But when the new majority came into power in January of this year, we were told that we would have transparency, that we would have names next to earmarks, that there would be time to actually discuss these earmarks and debate them, that if there were earmarks air-dropped into a bill, there would be an opportunity to strike all earmarks, at least one vote.

We don't have that today because this isn't a conference report. You simply have to change the name of the bill that is coming to the floor and you obviate your obligation to live by your own rules. That is simply not right. It's nothing that we should be proud of.

I mentioned earlier on the floor today that an astute Member of Congress told me yesterday one of the toughest parts of being a Member of Congress is to remember what we should be outraged about. I would submit that this is something that we should be outraged about, but we are not. We blithely pass it as if this is standard business. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't have been for us when we were in the majority, and it shouldn't be for the new majority.

It was in a press report yesterday that some Members were upset, I think justifiably, that there seemed to be just a few Members getting all the earmarks. They mentioned in the press article that a lot of the earmarks are going to the vulnerable Members instead of to the established Members in their district.

I would say that that is something I think outside of the Beltway people say that is just wrong, for money to go to Members just to be re-elected. But here, unfortunately, we see that and say, Hey, that is one of the noblest purposes we have seen for earmarks. Usually they're tied to campaign contributions or something else.

We need a moratorium on earmarks. We should pass a CR rather than this omnibus and go into next year without these 9,000 earmarks.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I was in my office and I heard the distinguished majority leader talk about personal responsibility and how we've got to get this deficit and this debt under control.

Personal responsibility begins with personal responsibility. There's an article that ran a couple of weeks in the Washington Post that mentioned one Member, who shall remain nameless, tucked in $96 million worth of pet projects into next year's Federal budget, almost all of which is in today's bill that we will deal with.

Included in that was an earmark for a group called InTune. When asked what they would do with the grant, they said it might be music camps, it might be lessons, it might be how to be a DJ, it might be how to create a television show. The last earmark that this group got was spent on lesson plans for funk music.

This is not personal responsibility. Were there not earmarks in this bill, we would likely have a continuing resolution that would fund at last year's levels, and we could start to get a grip on this debt and deficit that we have.

Mr. Speaker, in the past 24 hours, we have heard word from Cuba that President Fidel Castro does not plan to return to power. This is good news, I think, for all of us. And this is not a surprise to those of us who have been watching Cuba. But here we are, as Americans, on the sidelines again still. For the past 40 years, we have been on the sidelines offering no influence whatsoever in what happens in Cuba.

This is a travesty, Mr. Speaker. It is time for a get-tough policy with Cuba. It is time to allow Americans to travel there and spread freedom and influence. If we lift our travel ban, some say that Cuba will simply impose their own on us. But if somebody is going to limit my travel, it should be a communist, not my own government. We should let freedom ring here, and it will soon ring free in Cuba.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, those of us who have teenage kids at home know very well the saying ``nothing good happens after midnight.'' That is why you have a curfew. Nothing good happens after midnight.

I would say the same holds true when you are putting together an omnibus. Here is what you get when you pass an omnibus and you present it after midnight; 34 pounds, some 3,400 pages of documents here that we have no idea what is in there. Any Member who says that he has read it isn't telling you the truth. Nobody has read through this thing. We will be discovering for months items that are in this bill that we simply don't know. Preliminary analysis, and you will hear me say this several times, because that is all you can do is a preliminary analysis, a cursory reading will tell you that there are 9,241 earmarks in this omnibus bill.

Now, we earlier in the year passed a couple of bills without any earmarks in saying we would probably be nearly earmark free when it comes to the omnibus, or when it comes to the end of the year, MILCON and I think Homeland Security, because typically, particularly Homeland Security, that bill is not traditionally earmarked. Well, guess what? It is now. There are well over 100 earmarks in the Homeland Security one, and I think over 150 in the MILCON, earmarks that I have never seen, I don't think anyone in this body has seen until midnight last night. So those are air-dropped earmarks, more than 300 of them, I think, in this bill that we have had no opportunity to see, let alone challenge on the House floor, we are just seeing for the first time now.

Let me just give you an idea of what happens when you do things after midnight. Here are a few of the earmarks that were slipped in. These, by the way, we are always told that you have to leave it open to air- dropped earmarks because there are vital things that need to be done. Maybe there is a natural disaster somewhere, something that you have to account for. Well, here is what was added last night. One was a $1.8 million earmark for the East Capitol Center for Change, Capitol Area Asset Building Corporation, and the National Center for Fatherhood to administer Marriage Development Accounts in the District of Columbia. That is something that couldn't wait for a regular bill to go through? Did we have to do that in the middle of the night? How about $400,000 for the Burchfield-Penny Art Center in Buffalo? The Burchfield-Penny Art Center was so important that we had to air-drop it into this bill and not have any challenge, any way to challenge it on the House floor.

Let me remind my colleagues that we agreed in the transparency rules earlier this year that if there were air-dropped earmarks into a bill, we would have an opportunity to offer a point of

order to strike them out, to at least eliminate them. We can't do that here because this is not a conference report. This is an amendment between the Houses.

We have had that before. Rules are only as good as your willingness to enforce them, and we have seen a pattern of unwillingness to enforce the rules or to seek ways around them. Now, some will stand up and brag and say, Hey, we have 40 percent fewer earmarks here than we had 2 years ago. They will say we have 40 percent fewer, the dollar value is down. Well, if you look at last year, we have, I think the figure is, about 400 percent more earmarks than last year. It is hardly, hardly a mark of fiscal discipline to have 9,200 earmarks in this bill when you have already had 2,000 pass in the defense bill. For one, that is not a 40 percent reduction, and two, it is about a 400 percent addition to last year.

Let's reject this rule and reject this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I didn't plan to speak on the bill itself. I already spoke on the rule. But I have been hearing some of the conversation in my office and felt I had to come down.

The honorable majority leader mentioned that there are things in this bill we have seen before. That's not entirely true. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of earmarks that we have not seen before. Now, some of them are part of the bills that passed without earmarks, MilCon or homeland security. But in the case of homeland security, we were told we could do that because that's not a bill that is traditionally earmarked. It hasn't been.

Well, it is now. There are more than 100 earmarks there.

And the gentleman from Wisconsin mentioned that in Labor-HHS, there were only earmarks added for new Members who are coming because they are entitled to representation.

I would suggest that nobody is entitled to get earmarks. You're entitled

here, as a Member of Congress, to exercise oversight in how the Federal agencies spend money. It doesn't entitle you to get earmarks.

And, also, on that same point, we have the Energy and Water bill that we did consider, and there were hundreds, if not, I think, close to 1,000 earmarks there. Well, we added 34 more. I will just highlight one of them. There's one for the Northwest Regional Planning Commission manufacturing conversion for energy efficiency, a $5 million earmark.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

I said 34, but I will take your correction. Thank you.

But, Mr. Speaker, these were earmarks that were added in addition to what was there before. They were air-dropped. They are earmarks that we haven't seen before that we do not have an opportunity here to strike or even debate. I mean, there are some of them that are simply for a city. We are told Findlay, Ohio, will get $100,000. For what? Ottawa, Ohio, $100,000. For what? We don't know. The City of Santa Clarita, California, will get $41,000. For what? We have no idea.

We simply don't know what's in this bill. How can we be voting on it?

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today a bit disappointed but unfortunately not surprised. On December 4, just a week ago, the House of Representatives passed a motion to instruct conferees to remove the earmarks from this authorization.

That vote passed by a margin of 249-160.

Now, I have a little bit of experience with amendments trying to strike earmarks, and I don't think I've ever come close to 249. That's a significant number of votes. That was a bipartisan total, in that 60 Democrats joined Republicans to oppose these earmarks; yet these earmarks remain in the conference report. Every House earmark that was added remain in the conference report.

Simply put, if controversial earmarks like these can remain in a report and aren't eliminated, what earmark will ever be eliminated? When will we ever get around to eliminating these?

Let me just remind you that procedural irregularities surrounded the consideration of this bill when it came to the House. The earmark list required by the House rules was not submitted with the House report. The amendment review procedure was flawed. Members didn't have the critical time necessary to review these earmarks. In fact, the earmark list, when we finally got it, was submitted after the deadline to go to the Rules Committee to offer the amendments that would be considered. So we got the list of earmarks after the deadline to oppose them. So we had considerable irregularities going into this. And then we have a vote where the majority of this House, a clear majority, 249 Members, 60 Members of the majority party, said please remove these earmarks; yet they remain. They're still here. Why are we doing that? Why are we doing that? If we can't remove these controversial earmarks, when will we ever remove any earmarks?

Let me remind you as well there have been numerous, numerous newspaper articles, media accounts since that time about these same earmarks; some of the private companies they are going to, what kind of consideration or scrutiny was given. I can tell you, very little, if we don't even get the list in time to be able to offer amendments to strike them and then we're presented with a conference report where we have no opportunity to strike individual earmarks after a majority of the House has said let's remove them all. Why are we bringing this bill up? Why are we being urged to vote ``yes'' on this? I would ask the majority, please tell us.

As mentioned, I attempted before to convene a secret session to provide a review of the classified earmarks in the bill. That was defeated. But I would ask my colleagues who are associated with the 23 House earmarks in this bill to please voluntarily give them up. Concede that no proper scrutiny was given. And I will offer legislation in the next session to actually defund each of these earmarks in this authorization bill.

And I would encourage all of those, and I look forward to having all of the 249 Members who voted to remove these earmarks, to join me in pushing that legislation.

Madam Speaker, at some point this week, Congress is going to consider a massive omnibus spending bill that rolls the 11 remaining appropriation bills into one enormous bill.

I wish I could take the floor today and talk about what's in the floor bill, but I can't, because I have no idea. I'm far from alone. Save for a few Members of leadership, all of us are in the dark

about what could be in this massive bill that we're going to be voting on in just a matter of hours. With the likelihood of thousands and thousands of earmarks in the bill, our constituents deserve a process that, at the very least, Members have an opportunity to read the bill before we vote on it.

Now, the majority argues that such tactics are no more egregious than those that Republicans employed during our years in the majority. That may be true, but I would remind my colleagues that that's one of the reasons we find ourselves in the minority today. This institution deserves far better.