[Page: H11509]---
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. HAYWORTH) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to continue this discussion as we can with the time allocated. Let me yield more time to my friend from Oklahoma.
Mr. COBURN. Mr. Speaker, the fact is we passed a budget out of this House, and we passed the appropriation bills out of this House within $1 billion of that $601 billion. That is a fact. All 13 bills went out and went out on time.
Now, the question is, the question the American public ought to be asking is, what happened after it left the House? And I hope some day they will know how this process works and put people up here who will not allow it to continue.
Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank my colleague from Oklahoma. I thank my friend from Texas for his perspective. I think it is important to understand that there is far more that may unite us than divide us; and rather than pointing the finger of blame, I think it is important, after we await the verdict of the voters on the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November, if we should be fortunate enough to return to this institution, we certainly welcome our friend from Texas and other like-minded friends on that side of the aisle to join us in a governing coalition to work with the next President of the United States, who could very well be the Governor of my friend's home State, to work to unify and put people before politics and to deal with these real questions.
I do appreciate the fact that he offers a voice of fiscal conservatism. We may not see eye to eye always on tax relief or a variety of other issues; but by the by, I think there is a great deal of agreement, and I do look forward to that opportunity.
I yield to my friend from Georgia.
Mr. KINGSTON. Mr. Speaker, I also want to say to my friend from Texas, I do appreciate, number one, your yielding time for a real dialogue tonight; and, number two, your consistency on trying to hold down the budget numbers, because I think amongst those here tonight, we are all in agreement with you.
Of the other issues that are on the table, though, one of the ones that concerns me and everybody else here, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. HOEKSTRA), who is a chairman on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, is the President's scheme to federalize school construction. As you know, he wants to put in a big union pay-off and have Davis-Bacon in there and that will drive school construction costs up 25 percent on an average. We in rural south Georgia just cannot afford that. That is one reason why I think that we are here tonight, to put schools above politics.
Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank my friend. I think this is important, because knowing my friend from Texas and his fiscal conservatism, it simply makes more sense to make the money work harder. You do not do that when you artificially inflate prices for the cost of construction, or, worse still, when you take the authority for school construction away from local school boards and transfer that authority here to Washington.
In fact, I yield to my friend from Michigan, who has great oversight of this in his role in the Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we found as we went and talked to local school districts, but also as we talked to the different State education boards, is that they typically get about 7 to 10 percent of their money from Washington, but they get 50 percent of their bureaucratic paperwork from Washington. So, for all of these 760 programs that come out of 39 different agencies that are targeted at our local classrooms, with each one of those there come costs, burden, and red tape and strings attached, telling local officials, this is what you need to do in your schools.
[Page: H11510]
So what we wind up doing is focusing on process, rather than on what is good for our kids. The people who know our kids' names no longer have full control over what goes on in that classroom. It is time we put our kids before process, that we put learning before bureaucracy; and those are the kinds of issues that we are wrestling with with the president at this time.
Mr. HAYWORTH. Following the tradition of our friend from Texas, I gladly yield him some time to visit on these issues.
Mr. STENHOLM. I thank the gentleman for agreeing. Let me say I happen to agree with you on the Davis-Bacon provisions. I have agreed in the 22 years I have now been fortunate to serve here.
[Time: 21:45]
I think it is a terrible mistake to include, especially the new provisions that will allow local board decisions to have Davis-Bacon applied. It has nothing to do with prevailing wage. I have always agreed that Federal contracts ought to receive the prevailing wage. But I have spent a good part of my career attempting to first repeal and then reform the Davis-Bacon act, to no avail. But I happen to agree with my colleagues on that.
I do not agree on creating a new revenue-sharing program for schools. I think we ought to concentrate the money for school construction. So I disagree with my Republican colleagues on that, but here reasonable people ought to be able to work that out, have the legislative process be allowed to work.
Mr. HAYWORTH. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for that. I think again it typifies much of what we have heard about, in the midst of this so-called political season where there are honest disagreements.
END