Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to draw attention to the case of Sergeant Carlos Lazo. Sergeant Lazo is a Cuban American, a proud Cuban American who is serving in our military. He recently did a tour in Iraq and came home, wanting to visit his two children in Cuba. He was prevented from doing so, stopped at the airport, because we have a policy that only allows Cuban American families to visit each other once every 3 years. Here is a man serving in our military, proudly; we trust him in Iraq, but we do not trust him to visit his own family in Cuba.

It seems to me this policy is flawed. We will have amendments next week on the Treasury-Postal bill.

I urge my colleagues to look at this case, to meet with Sergeant Lazo who is on Capitol Hill today, and to rethink this policy of ours that denies Cuban Americans the ability to visit their families.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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

Beside me I have a stack of Congressional Records. It used to be that the Government Printing Office would print thousands and thousands and thousands of these because we did not use computers much. We did not have a searchable data base. These were very important and they still are, but by and large when these come around to congressional offices, they go straight to the waste basket.

We did an informal survey in our office of the Congressional Record. When the printed copy comes, we called about 20 offices or so, what do you do with them? Overwhelmingly, nearly all of them said it goes straight to the wastepaper basket because we have it online now, a searchable data base. You can search anything back to 1989 immediately the following day.

So our legislation would simply do this: it would save $5.4 million annually by instructing the Government Printing Office to print 1,000 per day rather than the 6,000 per day that they are doing now. We simply need to move into the 21st century. It used to be that we needed a lot more of them than we need today. We simply do not need to do that. This would also save about 57 tons of paper that are discarded every year, and all of the environmental damage that goes along with that.

This is a good amendment. It is a commonsense amendment. We simply are moving away from buggy whips and other things. We need to recognize that we simply do not have the need any more for printed record. To the extent that we need them, we will still present them. One thousand a day is pretty generous, and we need to save money where we can. And we need to have credibility when we tell Federal agencies to cut their budgets to live within their means. For us to go on printing 6,000 of these a day when we simply do not need them is not right.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. Chairman, I am willing to save time and money, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Offered By: Mr. Flake

Amendment No. 10: At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following:

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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

Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment to the Hyde U.N. Reform Act. I appreciate the work that the chairman has done on this important topic and the work of the entire committee and staff.

I lived in the country of Namibia April 1989 through April of 1990. I worked with government officials and the future leaders of that country as it sought full implementation of U.N. Resolution 435. This experience gave me a firsthand witness of how effective the U.N. can be in ushering in democracy and helping a country in its peaceful and successful emergence from the authority of another country.

Several years later, after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, I traveled to Iraq with my colleague, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence). While we were there, we saw the indulgences of Saddam, his sons, and his friends in the form of palaces and rooms full of booze, paintings, fine china, luxury furniture, and more. Several of these palaces were built and outfitted when the U.N. was supposed to be monitoring the sale of oil in exchange for food and medicine for the Iraqi people.

Sure, the lot of some Iraqis improved marginally under the Oil-for- Food program, but they were the lucky ones, and their conditions went from destitute to impoverished. We cannot characterize Saddam's agreement to the program as being driven by a genuine concern for Iraqis. His intention was malicious at the outset. He only agreed to the program after he was satisfied that he would be able to manipulate it.

My point is that I have seen the U.N. work, but, more often and more recently, I have seen it fail miserably. I will not recount the list of scandals, because it is too long. We have heard all about them already.

Let me just touch on a couple of points in the Oil-for-Food scandal, however, because that is the catalyst for the reform we are talking about today.

The GAO estimates that more than $10 billion of illegal transactions took place under the program. In January of last year, an Iraqi newspaper published a list of about 270 foreign officials, business people, and political entities that have benefited from the scheme, and many of those officials are from countries opposed to U.S. interests. Russia alone received more than $1 billion worth of oil vouchers.

Benon Sevan, the leader, the senior official responsible for the administration of the program, solicited and received on behalf of a third party several million barrels of allocations of oil. The U.N.'s own investigations under Paul Volcker have stated that Saddam's actions ``seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations.''

The son of the Secretary General was employed by a contracting firm up until the time that the firm won a contract from the U.N. for the program. The Volcker Committee reported that ``Kojo Annan actively participated in efforts by Cotecna to conceal the continuing relationship with him.''

Just this week we are hearing about questionable communications between the Secretary General and that same contracting firm. Two of the senior investigators on the U.N.'s self-appointed investigation led by Paul Volcker recently resigned on principle and said that the inquiry downplayed Annan's role in the corruption in an interim report released in March. So now, the U.N.'s own investigation is under question.

We need effective investigations into this scandal, truly independent inquiries. We also need to serve justice where necessary and where possible under our law.

In the last Congress and once again in this Congress, I introduced the Oil-for-Food Accountability Act with cosponsors from both parties, I believe around 70 at last count. This amendment that I am introducing today contains provisions of that bill.

Specifically, this amendment would create a certification of U.N. cooperation that, one, requires the U.N. to provide documentary evidence to member states investigating the Oil-for-Food program; and, two, to waive privileges and immunities of any U.N. employee charged with a crime associated with the program.

Mr. Chairman, this scandal is far too big and too connected to the U.N. to not include these amendments as part of an underlying bill to reform the U.N. I urge support of the amendment.

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

Mr. Chairman, before yielding the balance of my time to the distinguished chairman, let me just point out, if this is contempt, the only difference, because the Lantos substitute is the same substance, is that this maybe is contempt with teeth as opposed to toothless contempt. It is the same bill.

Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the distinguished chairman, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde).

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to indicate that I will be offering an amendment later to the State Department appropriation bill that will prohibit funds from being used to enforce new restrictions, new as of a year ago, that limit gift parcels to Cuba.

This amendment is called the toothpaste and toilet paper amendment because we prohibit those personal hygiene items from being shipped from a family member in the United States to a family member in Cuba. I would suggest, Mr. Speaker, that that is not what this country is all about. That is not what we should be doing.

When these new rules were promulgated, the Department of Commerce and the Department of State said we will come out and change those because of public input. Guess what? Over 1 year later, they have not. Those provisions remain in effect.

Family members here in the United States are prohibited from sending toothpaste and toilet paper and other personal hygiene items to family members in Cuba. The people of Cuba have enough to deal with just living daily life there under a dictatorship. We need not burden them any further.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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

This amendment, Mr. Chairman, simply seeks to prohibit the use of funds from enforcing a particularly onerous rule with regard to Cuba. There is a section of the code in the U.S. Federal regulation that governs the sending of gift parcels to countries for which there are otherwise strict limits of what can be sent.

Under the heading of ``Eligible Commodities,'' it reads: ``For Cuba, the only eligible commodities are food, medicines, medical supplies, radio equipment and battery for such equipment.''

Any reasonable person would agree that we should be permitted to send such items to ordinary Cubans.

In reading the next paragraph, however, we are told what cannot be sent in gift parcels to Cubans, and these restrictions apply only to Cuba: clothing, personal hygiene items, seeds, veterinary medicines and supplies, fishing equipment and supplies, and soap-making equipment, as well as any other items normally sent as gifts.

In other words, the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations does not permit the sending of gift parcels to Cuba containing clothes, personal hygiene items, seeds and other very basic goods, goods that would modestly improve the lot of ordinary Cubans.

It just seems silly to me, Mr. Chairman, that ordinary Americans cannot send to ordinary Cubans items like toothpaste and toilet paper. That is what this amendment is all about.

When the opponents rise and take their time, they will talk about obviously the awful dictator that Fidel Castro is, and he is. That is precisely why we need to reverse this. The Cuban people have enough burdens placed upon them living under Fidel Castro.

Why impose additional burdens on them by denying their relatives the ability to send personal hygiene items to them? What will denying toothpaste and toilet paper do to the regime in Cuba? I would submit that we are not going to prop up the regime in Cuba by sending toilet paper and toothpaste.

President Reagan once said, We must be careful in reacting to actions of the Soviet government not to take out our indignations on those not responsible. That is exactly what this amendment is seeking to reverse. We are taking out our indignations on Fidel Castro by imposing restrictions on what family members and relatives can send to ordinary Cubans. It is simply wrong.

America is a better country than that. We ought to stand taller than that. That is what we are trying to do here.

Keep in mind, if a Boy Scout from Mesa, Arizona, or somewhere in Virginia or Indiana or any State of the Union does a good turn for the day and sends soap or soup or tomato seeds to someone in Cuba, that would be a violation of the U.S. Code. If a Girl Scout in Michigan or Kansas happens to have a cousin in Cuba with a broken leg, the regulations would not allow her to send crutches to her Cuban cousin. Again, that is forbidden by our regulation.

What has our policy come to? Whatever happened to the proverb that says if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime? Yet we prohibit sending a fishing line and hooks so ordinary Cubans can have a better meal. The Government of Cuba is making it difficult for Cubans to feed themselves. So why can Americans not send fishing poles and hooks to them?

Who really believes a small service project by a Boy or Girl Scout would actually be propping up the brutal Castro regime, which has unfortunately served 45 years on its own?

I am not trying to trivialize the serious nature of the issues we are dealing with in Cuba. It simply is wrong to deny ordinary Americans the ability to send gift items like this to ordinary Cubans.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume to respond to the majority leader's comments, that I would think standing with the Cuban people would be to allow them to receive personal hygiene items, like toothpaste and toilet paper. Keep in mind these restrictions are imposed against Americans, not Cubans. These are imposed against American families from sending to relatives in Cuba these items. These are not restrictions on Castro. These are restrictions on Americans.

We that believe in freedom ought to give Cuban Americans and others the freedom to make the choice, do we send gift parcels or do we not?

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt).

Mr. Chairman, may I ask what the time is remaining and who has the right to close?

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Otter).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds.

Mr. Chairman, I find it interesting, the gentleman mentioned that our constituents send these packages. If that is true, why would they if they are all opened and money is taken off the top? That may well be the case, but they make that choice. They ought to make that choice. My constituents ought to have that choice. That is what America is about, allowing people to have the freedom to make that choice.

This amendment will allow them that freedom. The current policy restricts their freedom to make that choice. They are told they cannot send these items. Again, it is back to toothpaste and toilet paper. That is what we are talking about here.

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

Mr. Chairman, let me once again remind Members what this is all about. We all know the brutality of the Castro regime and how they deprive people of basic goods. Because of that, why in the world do we add to their burdens? Why do we deny Americans, Cuban families, Cuban- American families the ability to send items to their families? That is what this amendment is about.

We will hear all kinds of things about the brutality of the regime. Let us stipulate that. I have been there several times. It is worse than anybody knows. It is awful. People there live with such burdens. Let us not burden them further.

Let me say, last year when this amendment was offered, the opponents were saying the administration is going to change it. This amendment will be moot. Those regulations will change. There has been a public outcry; it is going to change. Guess what, a year later it is still there. The restrictions are still there, yet we heard they are going to change. Well, they have not changed. We need to send a signal this policy cannot stand.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

I have no beef with the Cuban government.

I have never met with Castro, and I have no desire to.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker I rise today to encourage this body the take up meaningful, comprehensive immigration reform. As conservatives, we believe in the rule of law. We believe that we ought to enforce the law, but before we can enforce the law, we need a law that we can enforce. That is what meaningful, comprehensive reform is all about.

We cannot simply focus on the border alone. We have to deal with the 10- to 15 million illegals who are here at present and have a program for them to go into. We have to have a law we can enforce, and as we do, it will make the border situation better.

When we create a legal framework for individuals to come and work and return home, we will have a much better chance of actually securing the border, which we desperately need.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I thank the gentlemen for bringing this forward, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Kolbe) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier). This is very important. That is why in Arizona we will find overwhelming support for this Republican and Democrat amendment. We simply in Arizona are dealing with a porous border, and we are dealing with costs that we can do nothing about in Arizona.

It is the Federal Government's responsibility to secure the border. The Federal Government has not secured the border. Hospitals are incurring costs. Education is incurring costs. Law enforcement, specifically for this, is incurring great cost, and if the Federal Government is failing to secure the border, it is the Federal Government's responsibility to pony up. This represents still just pennies on the dollar of what are spent in Arizona, California, and other border States in particular, but at least it is something. At least it is something.

President Bush, himself a former border Governor, said in 1995, ``If the Federal Government cannot do its job enforcing the borders, then it owes the States monies to pay for its failure.'' That is what we are asking for here.

SCAAP just reimburses States and localities for incurred costs for incarcerating undocumented criminal aliens. That is what we are asking for here, simply a little fairness. We need broader reform.

Myself and my colleagues have offered broader, meaningful immigration reform that will deal with this in the long term, but, in the short term, we need to do something for the border States in particular.

I commend my colleagues for bringing this forward, and I urge support for this amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde), the chairman of the Committee on International Relations, and also the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ros-Lehtinen), who worked with me yesterday to attach an amendment to the State Department authorization bill to allow some of the funding that we provide to the State Department to be spent on scholarships and other programs for Cubans.

For years, we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars at the State Department on public diplomacy programs that have helped individuals in countries transitioning to a democracy. Yet Cuba has been excluded from this. If there is any country that needs this help and a people that need this help, it is the country of Cuba.

So now the State Department has been directed to spend at least $5 million in Fulbright scholarships, Ben Gilman scholarships, Truman scholarships and others to bring worthy Cubans here to the United States to study and help reverse the tide recently of less contact with the Cuban people, to actually have more contact.

This is significant. Again, I pay tribute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde) and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ros-Lehtinen) for working with me on this.

I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I thank the gentleman for bringing this amendment forward.

Mr. Chairman, this represents a bipartisan step in the right direction. There are much needed reforms in this area. These agriculture subsidy programs are out of control, not just in the area of sugar but sugar is right on top. It is amazing that you could have something as sweet as sugar that leaves such a bitter, sour taste in consumers' mouths when you realize that we pay more than $1 billion a year extra just from the inflated cost of sugar to support this program.

Supporters of the sugar program like to say this does not cost taxpayers any money, but they ignore the fact that it costs to store the sugar. It costs to implement the program. And when you levy a tax on consumers by inflating the cost, it is just like a tax. It is just like a tax. So we are paying. Every time you bite into a candy bar, that is a couple of cents that you are paying extra. It is the principle of diffuse costs/concentrated benefits. No one is going to come to Washington to lobby to get 4 cents off their candy bar price, but the top 1 percent of those who are getting this subsidy are sure going to come here to lobby and they do and they are. That is why it is so difficult to get rid of these subsidies.

Let me just remind my colleagues some of the organizations that are for this amendment. The National Taxpayers Union, a statement from them says, Sugar interests like to make the claim that the sugar program is at no cost to taxpayers. As I said, they conveniently ignore that this monstrous program costs staffing and operating the bureaucracy necessary to support it.

Another statement from Citizens Against Government Waste: It is bad enough that the archaic sugar program forces American consumers to pay two or three times the world price for sugar and sugar-containing products. Even worse is the fact that more than any other farm program, this is an obstacle to advancing freer international trade for all agricultural products. We saw in our free trade agreement with Australia, for example, this was a stumbling block. It is a stumbling block right now to CAFTA. So it comes up again and again and again.

We have got to stand for free trade. I do not know how in the world you can support this program and truly stand for the principles of free trade. The Free Enterprise Fund said, In 2004 government price controls through quotas and loan guarantees priced U.S. sugar at more than 20 cents a pound, more than double the world price of 8.6 cents. So it is inflating the cost all over.

Also, for those conservatives out here, the Club For Growth has come out against this subsidy program and for the Blumenauer/Flake amendment. The Club For Growth will be scoring this amendment. For those who feel that fiscal responsibility is important, vote for the Blumenauer/Flake amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I intended to offer a couple of amendments tonight before the unanimous consent request was entered into.

I have complained for a long time around here that we are funding too many earmarks, the Republicans and Democrats. In this bill there are a couple hundred million worth of earmarks, Member projects that Members, we always complain that the President does not have line item veto authority. I would be satisfied if Congress had it.

Under an open rule, I cannot come to the floor and target individual earmarks because they are in the committee report. For the first time in this bill we have actually referenced a committee report and instructed Federal agencies to spend the money, yet individual Members cannot go in and strike earmarks from the bill. That is simply wrong. We are going the exact opposite direction of where we ought to go.

Members projects ought to be put into the bill. If we are proud enough to request money, you know, $500,000 for the St. Croix River in Wisconsin to relocate endangered mussels, then we ought to be proud enough to come to the floor and defend that earmark; otherwise, we are not good stewards of the taxpayers' money.

So I would just rise to say we need to change this process. We are going in the wrong direction. Either we are going to instruct the Federal agencies to spend it and come to the floor and defend it, or we are not. We cannot have it both ways.

And I would yield back to the chairman to ask which direction we are going here.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman. I think that the best way is to include it in the bill. If we are proud enough of our earmark, then we ought to come in and defend it on the House floor. Otherwise, we cannot simply refer and force the Federal agencies to spend the money without giving individual Members the opportunity to challenge an earmark on the floor of the House.

Madam Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I had planned to offer an amendment on this subject, but I will settle for a colloquy with the chairman of the subcommittee.

Before I start, let me just note for the record, I am glad to state to my constituents, I would have voted to cut the National Endowment for the Arts funding and, believe me, want that part of the record.

Madam Chairman, the problem we have in the West is in terms of Federal land. Looking at my own State of Arizona, 48.1 percent Federal ownership. The State of Nevada, 84.5 percent. Utah, 57.4 percent. It is going up. The problem is, it is going up. You try to run a school system in a county where the Federal Government owns 80, sometimes 90 percent, of the land in that county, it is tough to have enough taxable land to do so.

The Federal Government has tried to make up for that by what is called PILT, or payment in lieu of taxes, where they compensate counties with a high incidence of Federal land, but there is less of that than there is Federal land certainly. I would argue here and have argued throughout this appropriation process that we need to cut Federal land acquisition funding. We have successfully done that. The chairman of the subcommittee has been cooperative. We have seen a cut there. The problem is as soon as we get to the Senate, it is negotiated upward once again, so that PILT funding is not nearly what was authorized, and Federal land acquisition, we always get more than what we ask for.

I would just respectfully ask the chairman if he will work within the conference to keep the number for Federal land acquisition as low as possible. I understand that the $43.1 million, I believe, in the bill now is for land sales that are already in the works. That is understandable. But if we could please insist that that not go up any higher. As we go up and acquire more Federal land, we simply make the problem worse. We exacerbate the problem of PILT funding that is too low and Federal land acquisition, which is too high.

I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.

I thank the gentleman. There will be an amendment coming up, the Cubin amendment, which will seek to restore a better balance to Federal land acquisition as opposed to PILT funding.

Let me just point on this map again, people point to the red State/ blue State issue. The red in this case indicates the percentage of Federal land ownership, or the incidence of Federal land ownership. As my colleagues can see, there is a lot of red out there. We do not need as much red. The more red you have, the more red ink that local governments have. We need to restore this imbalance.

Mr. Chairman, let me just read this statement. It seems the Washington Post has some sympathy for this: ``The Federal Government is the largest landowner in Washington. Since the land cannot be taxed, the Federal Government is the principal contributor to the district's chronic fiscal imbalance.''

Now, if the Federal Government owns a lot of land in the District of Columbia, believe me, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, Colorado, we ought to really be hurting, because the incidence of Federal land is so much higher there.

The President had initially more than $200 million for Federal land acquisition. It has been cut by the chairman down to $43 million. It is still too much, and particularly when PILT is underfunded.

Offered By: Mr. Flake

Amendment No. 2: Page 6, line 13, after the dollar amount,

insert the following: ``(decreased by $3,817,000)''.

Page 12, line 17, after the dollar amount, insert the

following: ``(decreased by $14,937,000)''.

Page 24, line 1, after the dollar amount, insert the

following: ``(decreased by $9,421,000)''.

Page 80, line 3, after the dollar amount, insert the

following: ``(decreased by $15,000,000)''.

Page 45, line 16, after the dollar amount, insert the

following: ``(increased by $15,000,000)''.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday I voted ``Yes'' on H.R. 366, the Vocational and Technical Education for the Future Act. My ``Yes'' vote was entirely the result of an error on my part. For the record, I intended to cast a ``No'' vote against H.R. 366. I do not believe that vocational and technical educational grants falls within the proper scope of the federal government.

Unfortunately, I did not realize that I had voted incorrectly until after the vote was concluded.

Mr. Speaker, I respectfully request the opportunity to record my position on rollcall votes 149 and 150. I was regrettably absent from the chamber today during rollcall votes 149, and 150. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall 149, and ``yea'' on rollcall 150.