Floor Statements

Madam Chairman, I offer an amendment.

I thank the Chair.

I brought with me today a stack of Congressional Records. All of us are familiar with these. We used to use them quite a bit, but today not so much. Today most of us just simply go on the computer and have a searchable version that is much faster, searchable back to 1989. With the click of a button, you can find what you are looking for. So we don't use these as much. Unfortunately, we haven't caught up with the times.

These are just a few of the thousands and thousands that are delivered that are never read. This was just from one office, the Legislative Research Center in the Cannon Building near my office. These are those that are just going to be thrown away today. One office that collects a few of these will throw these away just today.

This year alone these records will cost the American taxpayer over $25 million. Recently my office did an informal survey of about 100 offices. We went in and said, ``What do you do with the Congressional Record that comes?'' Virtually all of them, nearly every one of those 100 offices, said, ``We throw them away. We wish they would stop delivering them.'' We had some offices say that they had requested that they stop being delivered. They are still delivered.

So they stack up. They are thrown away. They fill up landfills. I believe the figure is something like 57 tons of paper each year are thrown away just here.

Before the Congressional Record was put on line, as I mentioned, they were useful, but they are not now. We obviously do have to have some paper copies. We simply don't need so many.

Our amendment would simply do this, and I should add, this amendment was offered by myself and Mr. Blumenauer 2 years ago and was accepted by the then majority. It was simply taken out in the conference. I think we would do well to accept it again today.

This amendment would simply save $3.2 million annually by instructing the Government Printing Office to print only half as many copies. Today only 5,600 are printed. Half would do us just fine. That amendment would not reduce the funding for preparation, data collection or other aspects of the Record. It would simply reduce the ink-and-paper copies for half of what we print. So those who might oppose this amendment might say that it is going to cut deep and cut personal and others. It won't as long as fewer records are printed. The costs will go down.

This is simply a good way to save taxpayer money. It will show the country that we are interested ourselves in cleaning up our own house, making sure that we move ahead in a fiscally responsible manner.

I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee.

I reserve the balance of my time.

May I inquire as to the time remaining.

Before yielding 1 minute to the gentleman from Oregon, let me point out, here is the Code. The Code states that we are supposed to print 30,000 a day, yet we only print 5,600. So, it is not the case that the GPO has to follow what the statute says. They are

required to do by demand. And they already do under; they can simply do less and save a lot of money.

I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Will the gentlelady yield, since I am out of time?

Thank you. I appreciate the courtesy.

Let me point out, just as with any program that is not an entitlement, everything is subject to appropriation. The Government Printing Office is not bound, no pun intended, to print as many copies as they think they need. They can print as many as they have money for. We were very careful in taking $3.2 million, to take only the printing costs for half of the number that are printed already. I think that is reasonable.

Madam Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

The speaker just said that unless we have this amendment, this program will be gutted. The truth is the committee keeps the funding level as it is, and I think given the GAO report, that is only proper.

As my colleagues have already mentioned, the GAO report that was commissioned by myself and Congressman Delahunt noted that there were items purchased with the money that is supposed to go to dissidents in Cuba: a gas chainsaw, Game Boys, PlayStations, a mountain bike, leather coats, cashmere sweaters. How is that going to help the dissident community in Cuba? I would submit not very much. But yet the same ones who support increasing this funding by five times also will not support allowing individuals to visit their own family members in Cuba and take toothpaste or clothing items or even to take a fishing poll so that poor Cubans might supplement their meager diets. That, according to the group that wants to increase funding here, should be outlawed. We should continue to outlaw that but increase taxpayer funding for a program that the GAO says there was intense mismanagement, cronyism. A scathing report that came out: lack of bank reconciliations, lack of documentation to determine compliance with cost-sharing requirements, questionable travel expenses lacking adequate documentation, questionable expenses paid to family members of a grantee manager, hundreds of dollars of petty cash observed in the grantee's office that was not controlled or properly cured.

This is not a good amendment. If you believe in fiscal sanity, please defeat the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I recognize that a point of order has been lodged and will prevail, and I will withdraw this. But let me just make the point here.

This bill, like previous years' bills making appropriations for the State Department and for foreign operations, doesn't include earmarks in the traditional sense. In other words, it doesn't direct agencies to fund specific programs for parochial interests.

However, the report accompanying the bill makes reference to several nongovernmental organizations by name. I think it is most accurate to refer to these as ``soft earmarks.''

Scattered throughout the report is language which reads as follows: ``The committee is aware of the work of,'' and you can insert your favorite organization here, ``and encourages USAID to consider supporting such work in fiscal year 2008.''

I would suppose that, given the agencies we are funding, some of these NGOs are based overseas or are international organizations, and I have no doubt that many of them are doing good work. But why are they any more worthy than the hundreds of other organizations that are not named?

My amendment does not strike funding for any NGO. Rather, it simply would remove any funding preference for any of the organizations that are listed in the bill over organizations that are not listed in the bill. This amendment simply would prevent funding from going to any of these organizations outside of a competitive bidding process. With the efforts to shine more light on the earmarking process, I am concerned that we might see increasingly creative ways to steer funding to recipients of funding that Members of Congress want to see it go to.

I would like to know how these organizations managed to get mentioned by those named in the report. Who made these requests? Was it the administration? Was it Members of Congress? Was it the committee as a whole? Or the organizations themselves? Will the committee disclose this kind of information? Are these agencies going to be under any undue pressure to give preference to these organizations? Will there be any accounting for whether they have received funding or whether they had gone through a fair bidding process? Are we going to see similar soft earmarking in the future now that there is a brighter spotlight on earmarking in Congress?

I would welcome any answers to this question now or I would like to work with the committee to understand the rationale for this type of soft earmarking.

With that, unless the chairwoman would explain this or enlighten me as to what these soft earmarks are doing or how they come about, I would be glad to withdraw this amendment.

I yield to the gentlewoman from New York.

Yes.

Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment.

Offered By: Mr. Flake

Amendment No. 29: At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following new section:

Madam Speaker, reserving the right to object, I have a few

concerns. Early this year when authorizations came to the floor, authorization bills and the CR and also last year with appropriation bills and in previous years, it is a common practice to have the report come to the floor very late in the day. In fact, for the Intelligence authorization bill, I believe the report came to the floor a few hours after the deadline for submission for earmarks.

What assurance do we have that reports, the committee reports that contain the earmarks, will actually come to the floor in a timely manner? Because it will be difficult to enter into any unanimous- consent agreement on a bill if we haven't had adequate time to actually review the earmarks. I know there has been talk, there's always talk, about some 48-hour rule or 72-hour rule, but it is routinely broken. And is there any assurance that we can have on this side that we'll do better in that regard? Because the record so far this year is not good with regard to authorization bills.

I know that is not your fault, but I'm concerned that we won't get the committee report in time to adequately review the earmarks in it in order to enter into a useful unanimous-consent agreement.

In the same vein, we now have rules that require submission of a letter. You have them in the committee now. What assurance do we have that the letters will be released to the public? For every earmark that is in the legislation, will there be a letter with the Member's name next to it, the description of the earmark, the entity that is receiving it; will that be released to the public as soon as the committee report comes out?

With regard to authorization, I sent a staff member to the Armed Services Committee. The staff member could not remove the list, could not make copies, had to sit and actually just make notes of the some 680 earmarks, letter request forms that were there. Is that going to be the practice of the Appropriations Committee? Will copies be available? Can outside groups come in?

I would submit that it's unacceptable. The reason we have this transparency, where we have letters actually requesting the earmark, indicating the entity that it goes to, the specific purpose for the earmark, is so that we make informed judgments here on floor.

If all we can do is have one staff member go in, they have to wait while meetings are held, they can't go in certain rooms, they are told that they can only read from the list and take notes, not make copies. The practice in the past has been, and I am not saying that this is more a problem with the majority than it was with the previous majority, we had trouble then. But if we're going to have an open, transparent process, it would be nice to have, to actually think that you want this information out rather than holding it back as long as you can.

I thank the gentleman. I do hold the gentleman in high regard. It just seems to me that when the committee report is released, there is no reason for the Appropriations Committee at that time to make it difficult for other Members to view request letters.

All right. I just wanted it on the record that there would be. We've had it with the authorizing committee already. I just want to make sure it doesn't happen with the Appropriations Committee.

Good point. Another point, you made the example of the education bill last year that took some 12 hours to get through. My expectation is that there will be a lot of earmarks in that bill and many others. Last year I offered a total of 39 on all appropriation bills.

I was constrained considerably. Many of the amendments that I drew up and brought to the Parliamentarian, I was told that it would be subject to a point of order because the earmark was so vague, that the language was so vague, and that it didn't refer to a specific facility. There were many amendments that I wanted to bring forward and couldn't.

I don't expect that to be the case this time because we have better rules in terms of the letters, the request forms, the entity that has to be there. So what I am saying is I expect there to be more amendments brought.

I think it may be unrealistic to expect us to be constrained by last year's time frame. It may be longer. As long as it is subject to a unanimous consent agreement, and Members like myself or others who want to bring additional, or maybe more than were brought last year, can still bring those forward, then I think that's the only basis that we can move under.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the minority leader.

Duly recognized. I think that it argues for far fewer earmarks. You made a comment last year that I agreed to.

I know that.

I understand that. I know we need to move on. Let me just make one point. I think it is extremely important that the letters requesting the earmarks are made public at the quickest possible time. I will object to any unanimous consent request.

Oh, no, I am talking about those that are approved, that are going into the bill.

But what I am saying is outside groups have come as well. They would like access. I share the gentleman's pain in trying to go through and review these. That's why it would be useful at the quickest possible time to let outside groups as well review these.

That's what I am after.

Madam Speaker, I withdraw my reservation.

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

I have great respect for the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and I heard what he said about the position he's in. I don't envy being in that position, to try to wade through 30,000-some earmark requests. As he mentioned, there are some within that

number that will embarrass this institution and embarrass the Members, I have no doubt of that; and I think that's part of the reason that those have not been made public. I think that is the reason that they are kept with the committee.

But we are in a situation now where this well has been poisoned. If we go ahead and go through with the proposal that we simply in August list the earmarks that are being put into the bill, that are going to be airdropped into the bill later, without the ability to challenge them individually, there will surely be accusations, founded or unfounded, that people are being targeted for their opposition to earmarks, to speaking out on the floor, for speaking about them, against them or for them, or people will be favored or not. That's the nature of the game. That's the nature of the political process.

So I think it will be virtually impossible to go through that kind of atmosphere without the process being tainted even further.

I believe the chairman when he says that he hates earmarks. I think if it were up to him, he would get rid of them, and I would certainly support him. I don't think that the Democratic Caucus would allow that to happen because I fear that they believe, as we did as Republicans, that that's the surest path to reelection, that you protect vulnerable Members by giving them earmarks, that you spread it around in ways that you can curry favor with your constituents and your voters.

I think that is a road that leads directly back to the minority, but I wouldn't propose to give advice in that regard. I think that's part of the reason we are where we are today.

But all I know is that, when we have a situation, there is no perfect solution, certainly. We are in a fix now. But a situation where you have a choice of actually putting earmarks in bills with information about who has requested that earmark, what entity that earmark goes to, or balance that against a process where you simply can write a letter to the committee and ask about specific earmarks, I think that we as Members should demand the latter.

I, for one, am not willing to trade in this voting card. This is a card that we all get when we are elected that we use multiple times a day on this House floor. It allows us to register our support or opposition for specific legislation.

I am not willing to give this up for the ability to write a letter to the chairman of the committee or anyone else in Congress. That's a bad trade. I don't think that's a trade that anybody should be happy with.

I am intrigued by the chairman's proposal to offer an amendment on each appropriation bill to strike earmarks.

I would be most pleased if the gentleman would be glad to yield time if he would explain that amendment there is to offer. I will support it. I will gladly support it. So I would love to learn more about it. Perhaps we can jointly sponsor it.

But until then, until then, I think the country deserves to know what's in the bills when we vote on them. We aren't well served with the process, however intended, a process that keeps earmarks secret until a time that it is too late to actually challenge that earmark on the House floor.

So I think that this is a fight that is worth fighting, and I am glad that my colleagues have taken it up.

I support the amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

This has been an interesting discussion with regard to which system is better in order to challenge earmarks: one in which you can actually come to the floor and challenge specific earmarks in a bill, or in a committee report; or have a situation where the conference report comes to the floor and you have no ability whatsoever, no ability, to bring to a vote any of the earmarks that are in there.

The distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee mentioned that it is better to be able to write a letter to the Appropriations Committee and question an earmark than actually bring it to the floor because he mentioned that Mr. Flake brought 14 amendments to the floor last year and failed on every one of them.

I actually brought 39, and I failed even more miserably; I failed all 39 times. Nineteen of them called for a rollcall vote. I didn't come close on any on them because as the distinguished Member mentioned, logrolling works pretty well. People will say, I won't vote against your earmark if you don't vote against mine.

But this year is different, partly thanks to the reforms that the Democrats put in place in January of this year following the lead of the Republicans in the fall of last year where you actually said, All right, if you want an earmark, you have to sign your name and claim credit for that earmark.

Of the 39 times I came to the floor last year, most times when I came to the floor I had no clue who had sponsored the earmark I was challenging. Many times we had a vote, sometimes a rollcall vote and sometimes a voice vote, and I still left the floor not knowing whose earmark that was because we didn't have a requirement that the Members claim credit for them.

That is no longer the case. The Appropriations Committee right now is sitting on more than 30,000 request letters where the Members signed off and said, This is my earmark and it is going to this specific entity. That is something we haven't had before, and I applaud the Democrats for putting that reform in place. The problem is, if we go forward with what has been proposed, it won't mean anything.

But here I can tell you, if I was able to come to the floor with some of those earmarks, knowing which entity it was going to, knowing which Member had requested it, and to have the media and others, the blogging community and other organizations going through and finding out what that private entity was or had that private entity made campaign contributions to that Member, if there was a tie that we didn't know about before, it changes the dynamics incredibly here because them Members have to weigh, Do I want to do that or not?

The Appropriations Committee chairman pointed out there have been problems with Members and earmarks. There have been investigations and Members in jail, and there are other investigations going on.

If you have good information, more information, that gives you power. When you come to the floor and are able to point specifically at earmarks, knowing which entity they are going to and knowing which Member requested them, it changes the dynamics.

I would respectfully disagree with the chairman of the Appropriations Committee when he says that this process that is being put in place is superior to being able to challenge earmarks. Again, let me repeat. Under what has been proposed, we will never have a vote on any earmark; and that is simply wrong.

I thank the gentlelady for yielding, but we will have no vote. The process of logrolling will work just as it has in the past. There will be no vote, no ability by anybody to challenge specifically those earmarks on the floor of the House.

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

The chairman of the Appropriations Committee mentioned that this debate is really not about the bills that we are debating this week, and in a sense, he is right. Unfortunately, that is the case. Particularly later this week, we will be debating three other appropriation bills, some of which have headroom or a placeholder for tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars that we don't know what that spending is. It is put in place for earmarks to be added later.

So we really are not debating the real bills, and that is unfortunate. We should be. How can we as a legislative body decide whether this is appropriate spending or not when we don't know what is in the bill, when that will be added later?

I am well aware of the plan to have Members request and that these earmarks later on will be somehow made public. But that is the legislative equivalent of appointing an ombudsman. Why does a body like this need something like that? We are not potted plants. We should be able to see what is in the bills. These are earmarks that should be transparent.

The Appropriations Committee has before it right now some 30,000 earmark request forms that could be made public. Other Members could see them. We could see if these earmark requests are appropriate or not. But we are not allowed to see them. We won't be allowed to see them. We will only be allowed to see those few that the leadership decides that we can see, the ones that are approved later; and then once we do see them, we will have no ability whatsoever to have an up or down vote on the individual earmarks. None.

That is not a legislative body. That is saying that we can't handle it, so we are going to appoint an ombudsman, in this case maybe a couple of members of the Appropriations Committee, and hope that they will sufficiently scrub these earmarks. That is simply not acceptable.

To the other point, that we are simply defending what the President has done or what the administration has done, let me just take one program here that we are discussing today, and that is the State Homeland Security grant program.

This program is being plussed up by, I think, about $50 million, a significant plus-up. Yet the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, I think very wisely, in the committee report indicated several areas where this grant program is being misused, where there are several frivolous programs going on. Let me just name a few of them.

A $3,000 grant was given under the State Homeland Security Grant Program to the city of Converse, Texas, for a trailer used to transport lawn mowers to lawn mower drag races. For a fire department in Wisconsin, $8,000 for clown and puppet shows. That is under the Assistance to Firefighters grant program.

Under the State Homeland Security grant program, $202,000 was spent on ``downtown'' security cameras for a rural fishing village in Dillingham, Alaska. Now, ``downtown,'' there is a population of 2,400. This is 300 miles from Anchorage. There are no roads linking that city to anywhere. So $202,000 for security cameras in a remote fishing village in Alaska.

Keep in mind, we are plussing up spending for State Homeland Security grants by $50 million. Why in the world are we doing that?

Just a few others. $3,500 for small crates and kennels to hold stray animals. This is in Modoc County, California.

There are some even in my own State and in my own district; I think we are spending $100,000 or so for synchronization of traffic lights in Apache Junction, Arizona, in my district. That money shouldn't come from the Federal Government. We are making local governments dependent on the Federal Government.

Why are we plussing up funding for the State Homeland Security grant program by $50 million in this bill with this kind of wasteful spending?

As I mentioned, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee wisely pointed out some of these abuses. I will offer amendments to strike some of that funding. I hope that we have the support of the majority here.

This is not frivolous time being spent here. We are spending far too much money. We can ill afford it. If we can't do it here, when will we do it?

As I pointed out, we are not discussing a lot of the funding that is in the bills. It is off limits. We don't know what it is. It will be added later. It is secret at this point, secret from us, the Members.

So I applaud my colleagues for bringing forth amendments, and I hope that we will have more time to debate it.

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

Mr. Chairman, I rise again in support of the amendment. Again, we're being

asked to approve a bill that increases spending over the President's request by more than $2 billion.

The majority party wisely, I believe, in the report accompanying this bill, explained that there are several misuses in spending; that there is money that is being misspent. How in the world can we, then, appropriate $2 billion more than was requested by the administration?

If we believe in fiscal discipline, we should act like it, and we simply can't afford to spend this much more money.

I would also, again, talk about the earmark process. It seems to me that if we have a transparent process, or we require Members to actually put their names next to earmarks and to indicate the entity that the earmark goes to, that that ought to mean something, that we should be able to do something with that information.

Last summer, during the appropriation process, I offered I believe it was 39 earmark amendments, and I got beat on every one of them. I was beat like a rented mule. I never got more than, I think, 90 votes, and most times under 50 for those that we called a roll call on. It was because of the process of log rolling. I'll vote against your earmark or amendment if you'll vote against the others. And so it goes.

But we never had the luxury of actually knowing whose earmark that was. Sometimes, when the earmark was questioned on the floor, the author of the earmark would come to the floor and defend it. Sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes we'd have the debate. We'd have a vote, roll call vote even, and we still had no idea who requested that earmark or what entity it really went to, because the language was very vague in the bill or the committee report.

Now we actually have that information. We would have a different dynamic. If you came to the floor and said, I'm going to strike funding for this amendment, or, I'm sorry, for this earmark, because it goes to a project that is duplicative, it's wasteful, and besides, it goes to a project that maybe this Member is a little too close to, maybe that Member is getting campaign contributions that are linked to that earmark. Those are things that you can find out if you actually have the information.

That information now sits at the Appropriations Committee. More than 30,000 request letters sit there right now, and we have no access to them, nor will we. We'll only have access to those few who are approved by a very few Members. And then we have the luxury of actually writing a letter and asking about the project and having the Member supposedly respond.

But then to what effect? We can take no vote on it. It's all an academic exercise because we'll have one vote, up or down, on the bill and no ability to strip the earmark. So this process is simply wrong.

It's been said that the majority is backsliding on commitments made on earmarks. We've seen that, unfortunately. I was pleased to see the reforms that happened in January. I have said more than once I think there were more effective reforms, more comprehensive than we did as the majority party last year.

The problem is your rules are only as good as your willingness to enforce them or use them, and that's where we've fallen down. That's where we're not only backsliding, but I would submit we're actually cutting and running the other direction. And unfortunately, a process in which you have some transparency but no accountability is an unacceptable process.

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

Mr. Chairman, I think at this time of night, it is good to remind those who might have been watching or listening why we are here. First, this bill is $2 billion over the President's request. So it is spending that we simply cannot justify moving forward with.

The second reason we are here debating and still on, I think, the first paragraph of the bill is that the majority has decided to keep earmarks secret until this bill passes and until we get to the conference report when it will be too late to amend or to strike or to challenge those individual earmarks. That is why we are here.

The distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee has said that if this process does not go well, we may just have to get rid of earmarks completely. That would be wonderful. I would gladly sit down for the rest of the appropriations season if we were to do that.

But if we are not going to get rid of earmarks completely, at least we should have a process that even the majority party has said that we need, one that has transparency, one where we actually know what is in the bills, one that has both transparency and accountability.

If you have transparency, if you have Members' names next to earmarks and an indication what entity that earmark is to support, that is a good thing. That is an element of transparency, and it is a good thing that the Democrats put that in their reform bill in January. It was a good move, and I think all of us applaud them for it.

But what good is transparency if you don't have accountability with it? What good is it to know which name is next to an earmark if that request letter is just buried over at the Appropriations Committee? And none of us have seen them; there are some 30,000 earmark request letters sitting over in the Appropriations Committee.

The distinguished chairman said last year that we simply had gotten out of control with earmarks and there is no way, with the staff that we have, to police these earmarks. He was right. He was right. If you don't believe him, you can ask a couple of the Members who are in prison today. We simply haven't policed that process very well.

I would submit it is beyond reason that the Appropriations Committee and its staff can alone police 30,000-some earmark requests. It is simply impossible. So why not release those letters and let the other Members see them? Some 30,000, if you do the math, that amounts to 73 earmarks or so per Member. You can't expect the Appropriations Committee to police those earmarks. It is beyond them.

I think they make a valiant attempt, and that is great, but it is simply beyond reason that you can police that many earmarks. So release them. Let others see them. Let outside groups and others help in that regard instead of keeping those earmark requests secret, and keeping earmarks out of the bills until those bills pass and then drop them in at a time when it is too late to challenge them.

If you want transparency, that's great. Let's have it. Let's also have accountability. That is what we want with this process, and that is why we are here tonight. That is why we are only on the first paragraph of this very large bill.

I would suspect until we reach an agreement that either we will have no earmarks, which would be the best in my view, until we reach that kind of agreement; or we will proceed under a different fashion, we will say we are going to have real accountability, real transparency,

I think we are going to have this same kind of activity.

Because I think that this institution deserves better. Certainly the taxpayers deserve better than the process that they have been given over the past several years.

So I'm pleased that the gentlewoman has offered this amendment. I do support it. There will be many more amendments, I believe, tonight. I plan to offer others myself.

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

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the remarks of the gentleman from New York, and I do agree with him that it would be best, certainly, if the debate could center around the substance of the bill, the legislation.

That's why we're here tonight; the fact that we will have 12 appropriation bills coming up, and we can't focus on much of the substance of that legislation because it won't be included in that legislation. We'll have to wait. We'll have to write to the committee and ask for a request or request for a response back.

You know, a lot of us receive letters from Boy Scouts who are writing for their Citizenship in the Nation merit badge. I'm wondering if we'll qualify for the same thing by writing to the committee.

I think we're entitled to a little more than that as Members of Congress. I think we're entitled to actually debate this on the floor.

The other gentleman from New York who talked a bit earlier said that we're standing with the American people. I would suggest, you may want to go in and log on and see how this is being debated in the blogosphere or in the newspapers tomorrow.

Let me just read a bit of one editorial in tomorrow's Roll Call, for example, and see how they're playing it. Roll Call is not exactly a bastion of the right.

It mentions here, it says, ``So, on Monday, he,'' meaning the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, ``announced a new policy: Earmarks will be fully disclosed prior to the August recess after House voting, but before House-Senate conference, and may be challenged by writing a letter to the Appropriations Committee. After considering defenses from their sponsors, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee will decide whether to put earmarks into conference reports. There will still be no votes on the issue.''

The chairman of the Appropriations Committee ``reiterated this system was necessitated by time constraints that made it impossible to vet 32,000 earmark requests before upcoming votes on appropriations bills. Asked if he would revert to a policy of full and early disclosure next year, he said that he wanted to but couldn't rule out the possibility that specific circumstances would arise.''

This is what they say. ``This simply isn't good enough. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee should not only be disclosing all earmarks before House voting, but all earmarked requests. Earmarks should be open to public vetting, full debate and floor challenge.''

I have the utmost respect for the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He calls himself a reformer, and I believe that. I've had the opportunity to debate him over the past several years on these earmarks, and I know that he is troubled by them, as well he should be. And I know that he struggles with a way to deal with them.

I simply believe, and I think people across the country feel that we're better served with real transparency. And real transparency is not keeping these earmarks secret until the point at which you have no ability to challenge them on the floor, when you can simply write a letter and ask for a response.

We are legislators; we are not potted plants here. We are here for a purpose. We are here to legislate. And to be relegated to just writing a letter and asking for a response is simply not sufficient.

So I simply would say, Mr. Chairman, if the majority party thinks that they are with people across the country, I would beg to differ and I would ask them to reconsider that and wonder if people across the country really want a process where earmarks are kept secret until people in this body whose job it is to legislate don't have an opportunity to legislate.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Not one. I came to the floor 39 times and was beaten like a rented mule every time.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his courtesy.

One thing that I didn't have when I came before, I never had the ability to know whose earmark I was challenging. Many of those 39 times I came

to the floor, debated, even asked for a vote, and still had no clue, after the vote was called and it was lost, whose earmark that was. That wouldn't happen today, and I commend the Democrats for doing this, because of the rules put in place for disclosure. That is great. That is good transparency. But with that transparency, we have to have accountability.

I would.

Mr. Chairman, I move that the Committee do now rise.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

I appreciate you taking the time to bring this important issue to light.

I am the first to admit that our party didn't handle this issue very well. We went over about a decade or 12 years, depending on how you count them, from about 1,400 earmarks in all appropriation bills to more than 15,000. So the process exploded with Republicans in charge. That doesn't speak well for us as a party. We should not have let that happen.

I think right here near the end we woke up, and we passed some legislation in October of last year. Unfortunately, I think it was near the end of the appropriation process, when it was really too late to do any good.

The Democrats, to their credit, when they came into power in January of this year, passed a little stronger legislation than I think we did, and I think I and many of my colleagues gave them credit for that. It was a good thing to add more transparency to the earmark process.

The problem, as the gentleman from Georgia has so aptly pointed out, is that the rules that we set are only as good as our willingness to enforce them. So you can have pretty good rules with regard to earmark reform, with regard to transparency, but unless you are willing to enforce them, they are of little worth.

As the gentleman pointed out, when you have rules that allow the chairman of the committee to simply make a declaration that there are no earmarks in this bill, when there clearly are, we have no recourse. We have to accept that statement as if it were fact, when it clearly isn't.

The gentleman mentioned the war supplemental that came up. We actually had an example where there was a press release of one Member actually claiming credit for an earmark that had been received for that Members' district, put out a press release touting it. Yet, for that same bill, there was a statement in the Record saying there are no earmarks in this bill.

So, the gentleman mentioned, it was like a fairy tale. I think it's a lot like Alice in Wonderland, where you say a word has whatever meaning I give to it; and, in this case, you know, an earmark is whatever I pretend to call it. Unfortunately, that doesn't lend itself to transparency.

We have the situation now, which is far worse than anything we have heard before, that we won't have any earmarks in the House bills, but, rather, we will wait until the House bill is done, the Senate bill is done. Then the earmarks will be airdropped into the conference report.

Now, if that is the case, there is no way for any Member of this body to challenge any of those earmarks that come up. There is no way you can amend, because you can't do that to a conference report. You have to ask yourself, is that more transparency? Is that a better process?

The Chairman of the Appropriations Committee stated that more time was needed to actually scrub these earmarks, to make sure that they are proper, and that the committee was undertaking to do that.

I think, and I think those who have been watching this process will agree, that the best way to scrub the process is to let sunlight in to allow these earmarks to be made known, to allow the media, the blogging community out there, organizations that follow this and other Members of this body, to actually see these earmarks and to judge them and to determine who is it going to, who is going to benefit from this earmark?

If we are really concerned about scrubbing these earmarks, to make sure that they are proper, then let people know about them. Nobody is served well if they are kept secret.

So I commend the gentleman again for bringing this important issue to light. I would encourage him to keep up this battle and to make sure that earmarks get the sunlight that they deserve. If we want to really curb this practice that has gotten out of control, we need to ensure that we have more sunlight, not less.

Most certainly, I think across the country the taxpayers want to know what is going on. I think that they look at the process that we have now where Members will submit requests, earmark requests, but those requests are only made public if their earmark is actually part of a bill that comes to the House.

Now, under this new procedure that has been announced by the majority, those earmark letters, which indicate who the earmark is to go to, won't be made public at all until it's too late in the process to actually challenge that earmark.

So it means little to go through the process that we have set up if, by the

time it has any effect, it's too late in the process to change.

So the gentleman is correct, I think. Across the country, that's what I hear when I am out there. People want to know. They want open government.

When you think about it, every second that this Chamber is in session is captured on C-SPAN, this conversation and every other conversation, whenever this body is in session. When we are in committee, every word that is said is transcribed and is captured. So we have an open process.

Yet when it comes to spending money, we have a very secretive process in terms of earmarks, where, according to the majority this year, we won't know it all until it's too late to actually change it, until we have to just do one up and down, up or down vote on a bill.

There are several bills in the past, in fact, one bill, the highway bill a couple of years ago, that had 6,300 earmarks in the bill. You could conceivably have that again. At least, you know, virtually every appropriation bill is up somewhere approaching 1,000 or maybe 2,500. So, think of that, 2,500 earmarks in a single bill. The Members here won't even have the ability to challenge one of those, won't even know that they are there until you have to have to take one up or down vote on that legislation. I think every American knows that that simply is wrong.

Over the appropriation process last summer, I believe we brought 39 earmarks in several appropriation bills to the floor; and my effort was, in many cases, simply to see whose earmark this was and to have that Member actually justify the need for that earmark.

We simply didn't know who requested it. We saw it in the committee report. When the bill came to the floor, it would generally be a vague description of an earmark to a certain entity or a company. But you wouldn't know who actually sponsored the earmark until you challenged it on the floor. Then, typically, the author of that earmark would come to defend it, but not always.

I should mention that many of the earmarks that were challenged on the floor in the last appropriation cycle, the author of the earmark never even came to the floor to defend it. He or she simply knew that, through the process of log rolling, that other Members would know I won't challenge that earmark and the author of that earmark won't challenge mine.

So it was a very disheartening process to go through. But at least we could go through that process. At least we knew something about what was in the bill, because we had the reports come to the floor. Under the process that has been announced, we wouldn't even have that ability.

These bills would come to the floor, there would be no earmark, there would be no letters attached saying there are this many earmarks. There would be no lists listing the Members who had requested earmarks. Nothing. We would simply have to wait until it was too late in the process to actually challenge until the earmarks were air dropped into the conference report. So it's an important distinction.

I think the process has been far too secretive in the past. We would typically only get these lists in the committee reports hours before the bill actually came to the floor. But that's miles better than what is being discussed now because these earmarks would not be made known at all until it's too late. They would be kept secret from the body as a whole, and from the taxpayers across the country.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Well, I just again thank the gentleman. And just to reiterate again, we have had a bad process. We recognize that. That was the reason for the reforms that we did in the fall of last year. And as I mentioned, I applauded the Democrats for the reforms that they put in place in January. The problem is we're running away from those reforms rather fast. And if we are really serious about bringing in sunlight and transparency, then we have to stop this proposed new rule, or this proposed process I should say, it's not a formal rule, to make sure that these earmarks get the sunlight that they deserve, that every member of this body and every taxpayer across the country has a chance to see what this body is doing. That's what open government is all about. And I, again, thank the gentleman for yielding.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. This bill is referred to as the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. I am pained to say there is precious little of either of it in this bill.

The previous speaker mentioned that the voters were aware of the needs that existed here in Congress, and the majority party paid the price in November. I fully agree with that. I wasn't quiet on that subject in the last Congress.

I was overjoyed to see that the Democrats came in in January, and not that they came in in January; but when they did, they actually enacted earmark reform that I felt was a little stronger than what we had done a few months previous. Having said that, then we go to where we are today where we rolled back a lot of those protections that were there or simply ignored them.

The rules that you put in place are only as good as your willingness to enforce them. We just heard this past week that the earmark rules simply are going to be ignored. If a bill comes to the floor, and if it is certified to have no earmarks, we have no recourse, even though there might be earmarks, and have been in a few of the bills already this year. Now we have heard that the plan is to take the appropriation bills through the House process and into the conference process without any earmarks, and simply air drop the earmarks during the conference process.

This is not more sunlight. This is actually keeping earmarks secret until it's too late to do anything about it. No amendments can be offered during the conference process, so it will be impossible for anybody to challenge any of what will be thousands and thousands and thousands of earmarks in the bill.

This is not better. This is far worse than we have had before.

Let me just speak specifically to this legislation and some of the failings. I offered an amendment which would get rid of the so-called Abramoff exemption. Few people are probably aware, but public universities, or lobbyists who represent public universities, or State and local governments, are not required under this legislation, are not bound by the same rules that people who lobby for a private institution are.

So what, in effect, you are saying, well, let's just take the final four of the basketball tournament that we just had in the NCAA. There was a game between Xavier University and Ohio State. If you were a lobbyist for Xavier University, you couldn't take a Member to the game. But if you were a lobbyist for Ohio State University, you could treat your Member of Congress, your favorite Member or anybody you wanted to, to a $400 ticket. That's the difference.

Now, are we to assume that if you are lobbying for a private institution, that you are somehow inherently suspect, but if you are lobbying for a public institution, you are not? That's the dichotomy here.

This amendment was not sprung on the majority as some kind of a gotcha amendment. I took this to the Democrat leadership earlier this year and said, please, can we work together and get rid of this loophole? But we didn't.

The amendment was offered in good faith, and it was rejected. Why are we doing this? Why do we allow, right now, if Jack Abramoff were still around, he could still, under these current rules that we are going to enact today, Jack Abramoff could treat Members at the Capital Grille to a big steak dinner. We shouldn't be doing this.

The Jack Abramoff incident is what precipitated a lot of these reforms. I'm glad it did. But the problem is, Jack Abramoff represented public institutions, State and local government, territories. I believe he collected about $6.7 million from the government of Saipan. With that, he could continue to do what he did before under these rules, and we should put a stop to it.

I yield to the gentleman from California.

That is correct. Let me take the example from right at home where I am. The University of Phoenix can take me to dinner, but they can't buy even a cheeseburger. But Arizona State University right next door can buy me a seven-course meal. They can fly me wherever. There are no gift rule problems there. So private institutions are treated differently than public institutions.

That is correct. It would have been a very simple amendment simply to get rid of what I call the Abramoff exemption, but that amendment was rejected by the Rules Committee for no reason. Like I said, it wasn't a ``gotcha'' amendment. This was offered to the Democratic leadership earlier this year. They simply don't want to change the rule.

Mr. Speaker, just a few minutes ago I heard a Member of the Democratic leadership say we have ended meals and gifts from lobbyists. That is true only if you approve this motion to recommit. There is a huge, huge loophole right now in this bill. It doesn't include lobbyists who lobby for State and local governments or for public universities. It is what I call the Jack Abramoff exemption.

Under this legislation, unless we pass the motion to instruct, Jack Abramoff

could take any Member of this body out to dinner at the Capital Grille tomorrow and pay $300 for your meal because one of his biggest clients was the government of Saipan which is a territorial government. He would not be included; unless we include this motion to recommit, the Jack Abramoff loophole or exemption will still exist.

This is not a game of gotcha. This legislation was introduced last year, and it was offered to the Democratic leadership earlier this year. We didn't need to come to this. It should have been part of the bill. There are some very good things in this bill. This would make the bill far better.

State and local governments and public universities spent $132 million last year alone lobbying Congress; $132 million last year alone. None of the lobbyists hired by those institutions are covered in this legislation. Lobbyists for State and local governments and public universities have spent $875 million since 1998, none of which would be covered by this legislation unless you include and unless you vote for the motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, one of the hallmarks of this institution is openness. Every minute of debate in this Chamber is captured on C-SPAN cameras. Every minute of debate and dialogue in the committee rooms are transcribed and recorded. This practice is premised on the principle that the public has a right to know what factors go into our decisions here.

I don't think the public would be very pleased to learn how much of this decisionmaking process is moving behind closed doors, particularly as it relates to earmarks.

Over the past several years it became common practice for appropriators to include earmarks in committee and conference reports, rather than the text of the bills. Frequently, a committee report containing thousands of earmarks would come to the floor only hours before the final vote on the bill. At times the committee report would be made public only after the bill had already passed.

The bottom line is that, over several years, earmarks endured very little scrutiny from this body. I think the voters have become very aware of this failing on our part. My party, the Republican Party, allowed the practice of earmarking to get out of hand. Taxpayers have paid the price. This institution has paid the price. Finally, we

Republicans paid the price at the polls this November.

When the new majority took over in January of this year, they moved to include more transparency in the earmarking process. Members of Congress would, at long last, have to put their names next to the earmarks. We Republicans had done this in the fall, but only after the appropriations season was nearly done. This was a good move by the majority party in January. As I said at the time, they had the guts to do what we hadn't when it mattered, at the beginning of the appropriation process.

There is reason now, however, to doubt the sincerity of these moves. House rules are only as good as our willingness to enforce them. And we have, as yet, not been willing to enforce these rules.

When a bill comes to the floor now, there must be a list of earmarks with Member names next to them, or a certification that the bill contains no earmarks.

When the supplemental came to the floor, there were clearly earmarks in the bill, yet there was a certification that there were no earmarks contained in the bill.

The problem is, a point of order can only lie against the bill if there is no certification. So a certification, even though it might be patently wrong, has to be accepted by the Speaker or the Parliamentarians.

The intelligence authorization bill came to the floor without a list of earmarks. The list of earmarks only came after the deadline to submit amendments to the Rules Committee; so then, again, there was no opportunity to challenge any of the earmarks in the bill. Then, despite the fact that there were more than 680 earmarks in the defense authorization bill, no amendments related to earmarks were allowed by the Rules Committee, even though some of the earmarks clearly had no relationship to defense.

Now, we hear that the Appropriations Committee plans to keep earmarks secret until the appropriation bills this year have passed the House floor. Those earmarks would later be ``air-dropped'' into the conference report where no amendments are possible, where no scrutiny of these amendment or, I'm sorry, of these earmarks is possible.

The vaunted sunlight that we said we were going to bring into this process is gone. We closed the drapes. We've snuffed out the candle.

Mr. Speaker, this institution deserves better than this. We can do better. We should, on a bipartisan basis, bring this sunlight back. We need to subject earmarks to the scrutiny that they should have. No spending should occur in this body without the Members' knowledge, and that's what happens when earmarks are ``air-dropped'' into a conference report.

Mr. Speaker, I'm convinced that in the end, the majority party will pay the political price. I hope that we would move before that time. I hope that we can, on a bipartisan basis, simply move forward and bring sunlight back into the process. That is what I think the citizens of this country deserve. It's what the taxpayers need to have

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I rise in opposition to the rule.

The authorizing committee saw fit to include some 680 earmarks that we got news of just yesterday in the bill. Yet I offered four amendments to debate these earmarks and wasn't allowed any of them.

If they can allow 680 earmarks at the last minute in a bill, you would think that the Rules Committee could have seen fit to at least allow debate on a few of them.

The earmarks include $5 million for Diminishing Manufacturing Sources for Automation Alley in Troy, Michigan; $2 million for the Physician Order Entry Initiative for Mission Hospitals, which is a private hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, and keep in mind this is a Defense authorization bill here; $10 million for Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a former naval shipyard being economically revitalized with taxpayer dollars, defense dollars, for the city of San Francisco; and $500,000 for Rapid Identification of Technology Sources for the San Diego East County Economic Development Council.

Our role here should be to ensure that our Defense dollars are spent on defense, not economic revitalization, not nondefense private ventures. That is why these amendments were offered. Unfortunately, the only shot we might have at checking these amendments is in the appropriations process. By the time we get there, the Members will say these projects were authorized, implying that there was some sort of scrutiny given when there surely has not been.

So, unfortunately, we cannot support this rule. It doesn't allow debate on any of the 680 earmarks in the bill.

Mr. Speaker, we have a process here with regard to legislation and how it moves through the Congress. In particular, the rules were changed in January, some very welcome changes to the rules with regard to earmarks.

We said that if you are going to have an earmark in a bill, or in a report, that you need to state that you do not have a financial interest in that earmark, and then you need to submit that earmark, or it has to be submitted with the report so that Members can actually see that and see that there is no financial interest, see if it has merit or warrant.

This process is not being followed here. We were told initially that there were no earmarks in the bill, and then those of us who went up to view the classified annex did not see a list. There was no list available there. We were told later that it was with the Clerk's Office. Then with the Parliamentarians.

It turned out that we finally did get the list, and here it is, 26 earmarks in the bill. But the list was not made public. It was not given to us until 5 hours after the deadline that the Rules Committee had established to submit your amendments.

So somebody who wanted to amend the bill or actually challenge or to highlight or to discuss the earmarks that are mentioned here and listed here did not have an opportunity to craft an amendment.

Again, this list was received, it was made public 5 hours after the Rules Committee already shut down the amendment process. This rule cannot go forward like this. We cannot continue to do business like this.

We all know the problems that we have had with the appropriations process with the earmarking, the scandals that have gone on. The earmarking process is secretive enough, it seems, in the Congress without adding the layer of the Intelligence Committee. Then there are things that you can't even discuss on the floor, that we can't discuss openly; so it makes it even more difficult.

Members need not be reminded that Duke Cunningham now sits in prison because of earmarks he largely got in the intelligence process, in the Intelligence Committee. We cannot allow that to happen again. We have to have a process that makes sure that that cannot happen. And that process is not happening right now, when you don't get lists until long after the process, when you can't challenge them on the floor. And then we have the problem here in open session where you can't even challenge the earmark and talk about what the earmark is actually about because you are in open session and you might be talking about classified things.

So for that reason I am announcing now that I will offer a motion to move into secret session after these votes are concluded.

Let me just remind the Members, if you want a process where you know what is going on, we have to move into secret session. If you vote against the motion to go into secret session, you are, in essence, saying let's just let it go; I don't care what is in there.

I would challenge those who want to see what is going on to go up and view the classified annex. You may or may not be able to find out what these earmarks are about. But with this process, the way it is, we will never know, and we can't continue this.

I applauded the majority's move to new earmark rules in January. They were, I felt, stronger than what we did when we were in the majority. I think they should have been stronger, but they were better than what we did, and I said so. But we aren't following those rules.

We have already highlighted a few times that if the majority submits a list of earmarks, incomplete or complete, or simply states there are no earmarks in a bill, there is no parliamentary recourse for the minority or for anyone on the floor. We have to accept at face value that there are no earmarks or that the list is complete. That is wrong. That is something that has to change.

But when we are dealing with the Intelligence Committee on something this important, we can't let this process go forward without adopting some of the reforms that we have said that we are going to adopt.

So for that reason I will offer a motion for a secret session at the appropriate time, and I would urge a vote against this rule.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I believe the requirement in the House rules is that the report be filed 72 hours before it is brought up. Actually, those of us who went up to view the classified annex, I asked for the list, if there was a list of earmarks, and I was told there was none.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Yes, I reviewed and asked during that time if there were. I would say if it is the case that a computer glitch led to no printing of the list, then you would think that the Rules Committee would say, okay, maybe we should move the process back and allow Members to offer amendments on specific earmarks.

An unspecified opportunity. If the gentleman will continue to yield, Mr. Speaker, I actually offered an amendment that was rejected by the Rules Committee just encompassing all earmarks that might be in the bill because I wasn't given a list. I had no idea if there were any earmarks. And that was rejected.

The problem we have here in open session and the reason I will be calling to move into secret session is that in open session it is difficult to actually discuss what the earmark might be about.

Mr. Speaker, what I was offered about 30 minutes ago was an opportunity to offer perhaps a few amendments with regard to specific earmarks. It was never clear how many amendments I would be allowed to offer or on which of these earmarks. Until that is clarified, there is no reason to move forward.

And, also, let me point out again unless you are in secret session, you can't discuss exactly what the earmark might be about; so you might run afoul of any statements that you have signed or any confidentiality agreements that we are under in terms of classified information. And when I actually went up with the list to look at the classified annex again and pointed at certain earmarks, I was told that we are not sure what that was about. That was requested by a Member who is not on the committee. We don't know. And until we can have that Member actually stand up and be able to say what that earmark is about, whether it goes to a private company, whether it goes to an agency, we just don't know.

Yes.

I don't sit on the Intelligence Committee; so there may be some disagreement there about whether the ranking member was informed or not, and I think that will probably come to light later.

But in this case, if we had followed the rules, we would have had the list before the Rules Committee shut down the amendment process because you need to be able to offer amendments on specific earmarks. And in this case, unless a Member can go up and view the classified annex and come away with an assurance or some kind of comfort level that the earmark under question is for the intended purpose or it should be in the intelligence bill, then we are at a loss when we come to vote. I think our constituents expect us to be informed, and when we can't even go up and view the classified annex and be informed, then there is a problem.

Yes, I will yield.

My office has a timeline, actually, if anyone is interested, and when we requested the list of earmarks, when we finally got it, what we were told by which office, and I can tell you this is no way to run a process, particularly given the recent history of problems that we have had in this regard. And that is why I am concerned, and that is why I feel we can't do that in an open session like this. We have to go to secret session.

Yes, I will.

Reclaiming my time, I would not, given that I cannot discuss some of what I need to discuss in open session, given what has transpired. I don't think that we can. That is why we need a closed session.

I will offer the motion, and if you don't feel that we need to go into closed session, then you can vote against it.