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[Page: H10397] GPO's PDF
Mr. SERRANO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I might consume.
Mr. Speaker, today we take up the conference report of H.R. 2670, the bill making appropriations for the Departments of Commerce, Justice and State, the Judiciary and several related agencies.
Mr. Speaker, this year I jumped from not being a member of the subcommittee at all to the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee. Learning this large and challenging bill practically from scratch has made this an interesting and educational year, but it has been made much easier by our chairman, the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. ROGERS), who has graciously shared his considerable expertise and made necessary allowances for the new guy on the block. Working with the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. ROGERS) has been a great personal pleasure for me, and I thank him for his support and understanding.
I must also mention our very professional and able staff, some of whom we always see on the floor during the debate and others who are back in our offices. They have worked long and hard, including just about every night and weekend since conferees were appointed, to bring this conference report to the floor.
The chairman has explained the conference report so I will just add a few words. First, while there are still problems and concerns with certain provisions, the conference report is much better than the bill that passed the House in August. I think that is an important thing to note. So I repeat it. There are still concerns with the content of this bill, but this is a much better bill than the one that passed the House in August. If what I hear on radio this morning is correct and the President and the leadership of this House will take care of this problem this weekend, then this bill, I suspect, will get much better way before the Yankees win the World Series.
Additional resources were provided to the conferees and the result is much closer to the President's request in many areas. The conference agreement provides $1.5 billion over the House-passed level and $3.6 billion over the Senate-passed level. Like the House-passed bill, the conference report provides the Census Bureau with the resources it needs to do both the 2000 census and the necessary quality checks on it. This, Mr. Speaker, is a tremendous accomplishment and probably at the center of my support for this bill.
Like the House-passed bill, the conference report includes funding for U.N. arrears, but unfortunately it continues to restrict the State Department's ability to actually pay the U.N. dues, and I am very concerned that this will cost us our vote in the General Assembly. Along with the vote, we may lose any leverage we would hope to exercise over U.N. management and budget reforms.
The conference agreement, like the Senate-passed bill, provides resources to begin implementation of the Pacific Salmon Treaty, but one troubling provision waives the Endangered Species Act for the State of Alaska. This is an issue on which I have had many visits from Members and they should know the efforts that have been made on this issue.
The House-passed cut to SBA's salaries and expenses is largely restored, although partially subject to reprogramming procedures.
If I may depart from my text, if I could get the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. ROGERS), the chairman, to answer a question, and I am departing from my text just to ask the chairman, I understand that he might be willing to entertain reprogramming requests from SBA, something which is of great interest to me, to the agency obviously, and to our side of the aisle.
Mr. ROGERS. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. SERRANO. I yield to the gentleman from Kentucky.
Mr. ROGERS. Mr. Speaker, we have worked with the gentleman to significantly increase funding for the SBA's operations in this conference report, and that is due solely to the pleas and arguments and very persuasive arguments for SBA, of the gentleman from New York (Mr. SERRANO). So we are $45 million over what we passed in the House thanks to the gentleman, plus the SBA has the ability, as he suggested, to transfer additional funds if they are needed.
So we reserve that possibility as we go along during the year. I am very happy to continue to work with the gentleman on any further concerns he may have during the course of the year.
Mr. SERRANO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. ROGERS) for his response.
We still have to look, of course, at the losses associated with Hurricanes Floyd and Irene. I, unfortunately, note that there is a new hurricane, Jose. He is not on the floor today, but he would be creating problems that we will have to deal with.
Now, one area where we have improved dramatically and which I am very proud of is the Legal Services Corporation . It was initially underfunded at only $141 million, and as in past years the House amendment raised that to $250 million, and the conferees agreed to set it at the higher $300 million level, which is equal to the fiscal year 1999 level.
I would have preferred to provide more, such as the President's request, which was $340 million; but this is an improvement, a significant one, over the House-passed bill.
The conference agreement continues to underfund the COPS program and therein lies perhaps the most difficult part of this bill. This is a program that is a good program. This is a program that needs to be improved and to grow, and I think it is important that especially in the area of universal hiring that this bill be improved. Perhaps we will have that opportunity, as I said, before the Yankees win the World Series.
NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, while slated to receive more than $340 million above the House-passed level, is still $200 million below the President's request for important initiatives to protect our ocean resources and to help us better understand and predict weather and climate changes.
The State Department numbers have been increased over the House-passed level; and I think that this is, while still below some of the levels that were presented before, it is still something to note and something that we can be supportive of.
There are, unfortunately, some troubling issues that still remain and issues that could have been dealt with and were not, specifically the issue of hate crimes. We believe that on this bill we could have easily included the language that dealt with the issue of hate crimes legislation. We should not waste time trying to figure out the intricacies of where this language belongs. We should only deal with the fact that this is one of the most pressing issues in our country and that we have to address it properly.
I really think we missed our opportunity on this bill and hopefully this House will somehow deal with this.
As I have said, Mr. Speaker, there are problems with the bill but I did rise today and will continue to rise in favor of this conference report. One of the reasons, as I said before, is my relationship to the chairman, his support of many of the requests that I made and the hope that as this process keeps going along we can, in fact, take care of those items that we did not take care of. So with that in mind, Mr. Speaker, I will ask for a positive, a yes vote, on this bill.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.
Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier in debate on the rule, this bill is a lot better than it was when it left the House. Frankly, that is damning with thin praise but it certainly is.
There are five basic reasons why this bill is going to be vetoed by the President of the United States. The first is that no matter what accounting schemes are cited by the committee, the fact is that the new funding, new dollars for the President's Cops on the Beat program, and its successor program are only $325 million out of the over $1 billion the President has requested.
The universal hiring program, which is the program that all communities will be eligible to try to receive funds from, is funded at a level of only $92 million as opposed to the $600 million that the President is asking for.
[Time: 13:00]
Secondly, this bill resurrects an old argument left over from another bill on the Treasury, Post Office appropriations, and it renews legislative attempts to place limitations on the kinds of contraceptive services that will be available to Federal employees in their own insurance program. That should not be in this bill.
Thirdly, this bill contains an exemption from the Endangered Species Act for the Alaska salmon controversy. That should not be in this bill.
Fourth, this bill is part of a huge charade, which is pretending that the Congress is spending billions of dollars less than it is actually spending. Under our budget rules, if we call something an emergency, it then is not counted under budget spending ceilings.
We are told that the majority party does not want to sit down in the same room with the President and his negotiators and negotiate an omnibus budget arrangement because they say, when we did it last year, that resulted in $20 billion of emergency spending being jammed into last year's omnibus appropriation bill, in fact, $21 billion, as this bar graph shows. This represents last year's problems which our Republican friends say they want to avoid.
But the fact is that, without sitting down for that kind of a meeting, the majority has already produced bills which contain $25 billion in emergency spending, thereby exempted from the budget caps.
This bill contains over $4 billion of those phony emergencies, because it claims that the census, which, by constitutional edict, we must conduct every 10 years, this bill claims that the funding for that is an emergency. The budget act says that something is an emergency if it was unforeseen. Well, I did not know many people in this place did not know that the end of the millennium was coming and we would need another census. That is simply a $4 billion device to hide spending and to pretend that we are not over the budget caps.
But most seriously of all, this bill is part of a continued onslaught on the part of the majority party in this House, on the President's ability to defend our national interest abroad diplomatically.
The Senate last week turned down the comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Now this bill provides the money for us to contribute to the United Nations what we are obligated to contribute, but it does not give the authorization authority to actually provide that money to the United Nations. So it is a let-us-pretend appropriation.
What does that mean? It means that, because we cannot actually cut the check to the United Nations under this proposal, we will lose our vote in the United Nations. We will thus be joining Burundi, Djibouti, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Haiti, Iraq, and Somalia as the countries in the United Nations who lose our votes because we did not pay our bills.
What a wonderful performance on the part of this Congress. My colleagues really ought to be thrilled by putting the United States in this disgraceful condition.
Mr. ROGERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Iowa (Mr. LATHAM), a very hardworking member of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and Judiciary.
Mr. LATHAM. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Kentucky very much for yielding me this time.
First of all, I just want to give my most sincere thanks to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. ROGERS), the chairman, and the gentleman from New York (Mr. SERRANO), the ranking member, for a tremendous job, and compliment, I think, the best staff in Washington on this subcommittee.
Mr. Speaker, I think it is very unfortunate that people try to politicize this bill because it is so important what this bill accomplishes as far as I am going to focus mostly on law enforcement. But when we look at the Commerce, Justice, Justice Department, the State Department, the Supreme Court, Judiciary, it is an extraordinarily important and wide-ranging bill. I would hope that we would not politicize this bill.
I want to particularly point out the funding in Iowa in my district for the Meth Training Center in Sioux City that has been such a tremendous success to fight this major problem that we have in the upper Midwest, funding in this bill for video conferencing so that local communities can contact directly with the INS to get verification of identification of people they may suspect of being illegal, funding for the tri-State drug task force for local law enforcement for all the overtime hours that they put in in this great war we have on drugs today.
I want to stand in strong support of the local law enforcement block grants, the $523 million which is included in this bill. This allows my communities, my small communities, to get the resources they so desperately need for equipment, for computers, for radios, for bulletproof vests. This is the only way for these small communities, and I come from a town of 153 people. We need this kind of help in the local law enforcement battle that we are fighting with the drug problem and with criminals throughout the country. This is essential. I compliment the committee.
Also, the truth in sentencing block grants for the State are extremely important.
Again, I want to compliment the chairman, the ranking member, and the great staff.
Mr. SERRANO. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. DIXON), a great member of the committee.
(Mr. DIXON asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. DIXON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York for yielding me this time.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this conference report, but I certainly have some reservations that I had when I voted ``no'' on the floor when the bill was originally here.
I cannot quarrel with those that say that this conference report should not be on the floor, but the fact of the matter is it is on the floor. Certainly I would like to have seen more money for COPS, but the truth is that there is a substantial amount of money for COPS. I would like to have seen the fully funded request for the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, but that was not to be in this conference.
But important, it does have significant money for juvenile justice and crime prevention for juveniles. It has $287 million. As both the chairman and the ranking member have pointed out, it has $585 million for the Criminal Alien Assistance Program, a very important program to border States.
It also contains full funding for the census. Yes, it is contained under a gimmick, but the important thing is that the money is there to have an accurate and a full count in the census.
I certainly agree that it could be a better bill, but it is here, and the issue is whether the glass is half full or half empty. We can certainly make a case on either side. As a member of the committee, I see that the chairman and the ranking member have been exceptionally fair, and I prefer to see this glass as half full.
Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. LOWEY).
Mrs. LOWEY. Mr. Speaker, regrettably, I rise in opposition to this conference report, with great respect to the gentleman from Kentucky (Chairman ROGERS) and the gentleman from New York (Mr. SERRANO).
Unfortunately, I have to stand here again, as I have before, embarrassed and ashamed that the United States is the United Nation's number one deadbeat. If my colleagues want to help restore our good name and regain our influence in the UN, they will oppose this conference report and join me in demanding today that we pay immediate and full payment of our over $1 billion in UN arrears.
This conference report provides only $351 million to pay off our arrears, only after separate authorization, and only after onerous and impractical conditions have been met.
We have gone through this before. We voiced our concerns, and the UN has responded, maintaining a no-growth budget from 1994 to 1998, creating an Office of the Inspector General, eliminating over 1,000 positions, implementing other cost saving measures.
Withholding our arrears is irresponsible and short-sighted. We have already begun to feel the effects of our diminishing influence, and this is just the beginning.
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How can we expect the United Nations to continue to take our interest into account around the world? How can we expect them to fund the projects we support and to send peacekeeping troops to areas where we want to see more stability when we do not contribute? How do we expect to help continue to reform the United Nations in a meaningful way to cut down on its bureaucracy and decrease our annual dues if we do not pay our debt?
This funding is critical to United States foreign policy. It shows the international community that a commitment made by the United States means something, and it is a cost effective way for us to leverage U.S. funding with that of the other members of the United Nations to make a difference around the world.
Our continued participation in the UN is critical to United States global leadership, which in turn is the cornerstone of our national security.
I would be remiss, Mr. Speaker, if I did not also express my outrage about a trick played on us in this bill. The majority has violated the jurisdiction of the Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government appropriation by modifying the newly signed fiscal year 2000 Treasury, Postal law in the Commerce, Justice, State bill.
It goes without saying that the Commerce, Justice bill has no jurisdiction over the programs in the Treasury, Postal bill. This conference report passed the House 292 to 126, a broad bipartisan margin, and was signed by the President on September 29. Not even 3 weeks later, the Republicans undo the bipartisan agreement, one of the few bipartisan bills that this ridiculous process has produced.
I urge my colleagues to reject this conference report. Let us get serious about the budget process. Let us make the modifications to what is a good bill and reject this proposal.
Mr. ROGERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to gentleman from Ohio (Mr. REGULA), one of the more valued members in our subcommittee. He is also, incidentally, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Interior of the full Committee on Appropriations.
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