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SEC. 3. Upon the adoption of this resolution it shall be in order without intervention of any point of order to consider in the House the joint resolution (H.J. Res. 123) making

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    SEC. 4. Upon the adoption of this resolution it shall be in order without intervention of any point of order to consider in the House the joint resolution (H.J. Res. 124) making further continuing appropriations for the fiscal year 2001, and for other purposes. The joint resolution shall be considered as read for amendment. The previous question shall be considered as ordered on the joint resolution to final passage without intervening motion except: (1) one hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chairman and ranking minority member of the Committee on Appropriations; and (2) one motion to recommit.

   ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE SPEAKER PRO TEMPORE

   The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Pease). Members are reminded that the use of personal electronic communications devices is prohibited in the Chamber of the House, and they are to disable wireless telephones before entering the Chamber of the House.

   The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) is recognized for 1 hour.

   Mr. Linder. Mr. Speaker, for the purposes of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Moakley) pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

   Mr. Speaker, House Resolution 662 is a closed rule providing for consideration of House Joint Resolutions 121, 122, 123 and 124. Each of these joint resolutions make further continuing appropriations for fiscal year 2001 for a period of 1 day. Mr. Speaker, H. Res. 662 provides for 1 hour of debate on each joint resolution, equally divided and controlled by the chairman and ranking minority member of the Committee on Appropriations. The rule waives all points of order against the consideration of these joint resolutions. Finally, the rule provides one motion to recommit on each joint resolution, as is the right of the minority. This rule was favorably reported by the Committee on Rules yesterday, and I urge my colleagues to support it.

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

   Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) for being more brief than he was the last time. He caught me off guard. I thank the gentleman for yielding me the customary half-hour, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

   Mr. Speaker, this rule provides for the consideration of the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth continuing resolutions we have done in the last month. Each one of these continuing resolutions will keep the Federal Government open just 1 more day, because my Republican colleagues just have not finished their 13 appropriation bills.

   The 1974 Budget Act requires that these bills, those 13 bills, be signed into law by October 1. But, my Republican colleagues have spent much too much time passing tax breaks for big business and not enough time on school construction.

   So, here we are on October 30 with only five appropriation bills signed into law. Those bills are Defense, Military Construction, Interior, Transportation, and Agriculture, and VA-HUD and Energy and Water. Meanwhile, waiting at the White House are Legislative Branch, Treasury-Postal, and others. Still outstanding are Labor, Health and Human Services; Commerce, State, Justice; Foreign Operations; and District of Columbia. But, because so many bills are outstanding, Mr. Speaker, my Republican colleagues have been forcing Congress to spend time passing emergency measures and protections for special interests, while Democrats have still been fighting for new school construction.

   Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Mrs. JOHNSON) and the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) have a school construction bill that is supported by 230 Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike. This bill would provide $25 billion over 10 years of interest-free financing for school construction and modernization with prevailing wage protections. But my Republican colleagues refuse to put this bill into the Labor, Health and Human Service appropriation bill so that the President can sign it and local communities can begin building new schools.

   So, rather than wasting time this month on abbreviated work weeks, renaming post offices, and tax breaks for the special interests, my Republican colleagues should have been passing Medicare reform, prescription drug programs within Medicare, and funding school construction.

   Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose this rule.

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

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

   Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to yield 8 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm).

   (Mr. STENHOLM asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

   Mr. STENHOLM. Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose this rule. I think we ought to do 1-day rules and 1-day CRs, but more importantly, I think it is time for us to reach the compromises necessary and finish up the work of the 106 Congress.

   We are all asking why we are here today, and we have different views on it. According to ``The Baltimore Sun,'' it is because of Republican gridlock in Congress again. Once again, leaders of this House are finding they cannot get their way. Whatever happened to the fine art of compromise? I know my friends on the other side of the aisle would differ with that and have a different opinion of that. Both sides are right, perhaps.

   But perhaps a little practical constitutional reminder is in order for us today. You, we, cannot beat a President, unless we have two-thirds of the votes. The Constitution guarantees that under our separate, but coequal branches of government, that the only way the House of Representatives can win is to have two-thirds of the vote, no matter how we like or dislike a President, now or in the future. And we cannot get two-thirds of the vote, unless we are willing to work with at least some on the other side of the aisle which, unfortunately, our leadership has chosen not to do.

   Remember the budget resolution where all of this began? The President's budget called for $637 billion in spending, and you said you were going to hold discretionary spending to $625 billion and you complained about big spending Democrats, including we Blue Dogs, those of us in the Blue Dog Coalition proposed a budget suggesting a compromise of $633 billion. This budget was supported by 138 Democrats and 37 Republicans.

[Time: 11:15]

   If 45 more Republicans had joined with 137 of us, perhaps the debate would be a little different. Perhaps we would not even be here. If the leadership in Congress had been willing to work with us, we could have had a credible bipartisan budget that would have held spending down to $633 billion. Instead, we are on a path to spend $645 billion or more next year, $12 billion more than the Blue Dogs suggested and $8 billion more than the President requested. Some compromise.

   Some compromise, spending $8 billion more than the President. And yet my colleagues, some continue to come to the floor and say how much more are we going to spend. Well, they have won on this issue. When we passed the rule last week on the foreign operations bill, they voted to raise, at least some, not all, a majority of us, not me, voted to raise the caps to $645 billion. The issue of how much we are going to spend is a moot issue.

   I would much rather have held it to $633 billion. My Republican colleagues wanted to go to $645 billion. The President wanted to keep it at $637 billion.

   So let us not have any more of this because any of these issues that spend more money, my colleagues should know by now that the rules of the House suggest that if we spend more than $645 billion, we will sequester all spending next year to bring the level back to $645 billion if we mean it, and I hope we mean it. So let us quit talking about that money is the issue.

   I do not know how the leadership in the House honestly can complain that Democrats are big spenders when they have already voted appropriation bills

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   Under the plan being pushed by leaders in the Congress, we will squander the surpluses that should be used to deal with a variety of my priorities including eliminating our national debt. Leadership is taking credit for debt reduction that was achieved only because their proposals to use the entire budget surplus for tax cuts was defeated.

   The recent conversion to debt reduction rhetoric after 2 years of rhetoric to the contrary comes after their tax cut proposals fell flat. The cover of the September 16 issue of Congressional Quarterly described the leadership strategy with this headline: ``Desperate to find a way out, GOP settles for debt reduction.''

   Mr. Speaker, we easily could have bipartisan agreement on death tax relief, on marriage tax penalty relief, on a Medicare prescription drug benefit, a Patients' Bill of Rights, campaign finance reform legislation; yet this Congress will adjourn without enacting any legislation on any of these issues. The leadership has chosen to take these issues off the table. They have won on these issues. They are off the table. But we will not go home, we will not go home without making sure we have given our hospitals, nursing homes, and home health care providers the relief that they need. That is the dividing issue, the one that must be worked out.

   There is strong support among Democrats for meaningful estate tax relief that would repeal the death tax for all estates less than $4 million and reduce rates for all other estates by 20 percent immediately. This proposal could be signed into law. But according to the Wall Street Journal, some in the Republican leadership rejected that proposal because they are afraid that ``the GOP would lose a powerful election-year issue for its candidates.'' And they might be right.

   We heard a lot of rhetoric Saturday about the need for a national energy policy; yet we are about to conclude another Congress without any effort on the part of the House to develop a national consensus on energy policy. We could have taken a small step by adopting the tax incentives for domestic oil and gas producers that were included in the Senate version of the tax bill, but for some reason the leadership of the House opposed this bipartisan effort as well.

   Surely we can reach a bipartisan agreement now if leaders of the Congress are willing to work with the President to find compromises on the remaining issues. But I have to ask, why did the congressional leadership not accept the President's offer to meet yesterday to discuss an agreement on responsible tax relief and a Medicare package that provides assistance to health care providers as well as beneficiaries, instead of providing over 40 percent of the funding for HMOs?

   Let me repeat so that all of us can understand and hear clearly, particularly the leaders of the Congress: we will not have a final budget agreement that allows us to leave here without making sure we have given our health care providers the relief that they must have, nor

   without satisfactory compromises regarding school construction, class size reduction, immigration, and the other issues remaining.

   We would not need to be here on October 30 if 2 or 3 months ago, when this work should have been happening, the Republican leadership had been willing to work with us in a bipartisan spirit on a fiscally-responsible budget that funded priority programs including Medicare, provided reasonable tax relief, and paid down the debt. Unfortunately, for some reason the leadership has chosen a course that has produced gridlock and inaction.

   Mr. Speaker, it is your move. The ball is in your court. Do your job and you will find a lot of bipartisan support, especially if you were to ask.

   This is the message that I hope that all of us will take. It is time to quit the fingerpointing. We are down to the last few issues. Some of them are very, very important; but all of them must be compromised. It is unrealistic to believe that anyone, the President or the House, can get their way absolutely. But a reasonable compromise on all of these issues could be reached this afternoon if only we would find the willingness to sit down and to talk to each other, a willingness that we have not been willing to do for the last 2 years, 4 years or 6 years. That is why we are here today.

   Again, we cannot, we cannot defeat this President, the next President, or any President unless we have two-thirds of the vote. We cannot get two-thirds of the vote unless we work for it.

   Mr. LINDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth).

   Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm), who in the well of the House outlined many of the same arguments that he outlined last night when we gathered here in informal session to have an honest discussion on some differences.

   One thing that I think is interesting is this: when the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Gutknecht) put the question to the gentleman from Texas, if we reverted to the President's original budget numbers, if that were the key to accommodate the President as my friend points out, that certainly the President has a role in this process, if we were to revert to the President's original estimates, could there be a guarantee that the President would sign the appropriations bills? The gentleman from Texas was very candid last night. He said he could not guarantee that, and he respectfully submitted that that was not the question.

   But, Mr. Speaker, that is exactly the question, because that is the argument my friend from Texas has made. We do not seek to ignore the President or deal with some sort of blatant hostility. We understand consensus and compromise and we have done that. And even as the gentleman outlined the challenge confronting us with Medicare, I would remind all of my colleagues that just last week on this floor we passed a piece of legislation vital for health care with the bulk of the help going to hospitals, especially rural hospitals, to local health care, to nursing homes.

   The fact is some chose not to vote for it. Now, good people can disagree. We are here in this situation, as we try to find consensus and compromise, and the question again, Mr. Speaker, is this: How much is enough?

   I understand the calendar. I do not presume to be naive. I know this is the political season. But I would join with the gentleman from Texas who says let us not engage in fingerpointing. Indeed, Mr. Speaker, the challenge before us is to put people before politics, and that is what I suggest we do.

   Mr. MOAKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior), the Democratic whip.

   Mr. BONIOR. Mr. Speaker, for those Americans who may be following these proceedings, they might be asking themselves what exactly are we doing here 30 days after the appropriation and funding bills are supposed to have been enacted into law? What have we accomplished? Or a better question: What have we not accomplished this Congress?

   I would like to give a brief overview. Over the last 2 years, the Republican leadership of this Congress has had a unique opportunity. It was an opportunity to work with House Democrats and to work with the President to craft a sensible, bipartisan solution to some of America's most difficult and toughest problems: the unchecked powers of the HMOs to veto family health care decisions; the fact that literally millions of senior citizens cannot afford to buy prescription medicine that they need; the need to increase the minimum wage for those people who work and make this country run by taking care of our seniors in nursing homes and feeding us and cleaning our offices and taking care of our children in child day care centers; the fact that kids from one end of this country to the other are forced to go to school in cramped, overcrowded classrooms.

   The Republican leadership had 2 whole years, some would say 6 years since they became the majority, to work with President Clinton and Democrats to respond to these problems. Had they decided to work with us

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   Minimum wage workers who are struggling, often adults with a couple of children, to provide for their family could have had thousands of dollars into their pockets. But I am sad to say that instead of rolling up their sleeve and working with us, the Republican majority chose to obfuscate, to shrug their shoulders, to walk away.

   Mr. Speaker, just do not take my word for it. Listen to what America's leading newspapers are saying. Rollcall: ``What a mess.......If (voters) paid attention, they'd surely be appalled, as practically everybody here in this town is. House leaders failed to work out a joint strategy with Senate leaders, and they have been utterly uninterested in working with House Democrats.''

   The Washington Post: ``The Un-Congress continues neither to work nor adjourn. For 2 years, it has mainly pretended to deal with issues that it has systematically avoided.''

   The Baltimore Sun: ``Whatever happened to the fine art of compromise? It seems to have vanished from the lexicon of Republicans on Capitol Hill. The result is more gridlock in Washington, as Republicans try to force their political agenda down President Clinton's throat.''

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