Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008--Conference Report
Floor Speech
DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008--CONFERENCE REPORT -- (Senate - November 07, 2007)
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Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I urge all Senators to support the Labor-Health and Human Services appropriations conference report. The Senate version of this bill passed, as we all know, a couple weeks ago. We had 75 votes in favor of it. We would have had 80 votes if all Senators had been here. So it was a strong bipartisan endorsement of a bill that reflected priorities on both sides of the aisle.
I am here today to say I am pleased the conference report we are considering is even stronger than the bill the Senate approved 2 weeks ago. Much has been added to the bill. I thought what I might do, for the benefit of other Senators, is sort of run through the priorities in this bill and what our appropriations bill does compared to the President's budget. I think it will give everyone a good idea of how strong this bill is, why we garnered so much support in the first place and why I hope we will garner even more support with the conference report.
Right now, the conference report invests about $8.2 billion more than last year in education, health, and labor programs. The President's budget cut $3.5 billion--cut $3.5 billion--from these programs. I will run through those now, and I will give you a good idea what those are.
Let's take home energy assistance. This is the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. At a time when we have record high energy prices, the conference report boosts it by $250 million. The President's budget cut the LIHEAP program by $379 million. It is a clear contrast between the President's budget and where we are.
Student aid. Since this covers education, what we did is have the biggest increase ever in support for Pell grants for kids who are at the lowest rung on the economic ladder who need these grants in order to even go to college. So what we did in our bill is we boosted the maximum award to $4,925. The President's budget limited it to $4,550, which is far short of the amount needed to even begin to pay for higher tuition.
Strengthening the poor. Now, here again, in the conference report, we have provided $2.4 billion in the block grants for the Social Services Block Grant Program and the Community Services Block Grant Program. These are the things that go for housing for the poor. It goes for things such as Head Start Programs, all that helps to shore up our social services system and also community systems--as I said, whether it is housing, homeless aid, things such as that for the country.
We have provided $2.4 billion for that. The President's budget cut both of these. In fact, it cut the community services block grants to zero. They absolutely zeroed it out. Then they cut the social services block grants by about a third. So when you add them together, he cut them both by about 50 percent--at a time when we have more poor people in this country than we had in the last several years, when, again, the cost of housing is up, all the other things are up for poor people to pay. Yet he wants to cut it by 50 percent. Unconscionable. Well, we met our obligations. We put in $2.4 billion for that.
The next one is medical research. Now, again, this Senate has been on record time and time again supporting healthy, good increases for the National Institutes of Health for the research needed for overcoming Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and for the research that is being done at the National Cancer Institute and all the basic research that is funded that goes out to all our colleges and universities and other entities around the country.
We made such great progress in breaking the genetic code. We are making such great progress in understanding a lot of the illnesses. We are on the threshold with stem cell research and others of entering into a whole new era of uncovering the causes and the therapeutic treatments and cures for a lot of these illnesses. So we are right on that threshold.
The President's budget cut the National Institutes of Health by $279 million--actually cut it. Our conference report has added $1.1 billion for the National Institutes of Health. Actually, it is slightly more than what we had in the Senate when we passed the bill a couple weeks ago.
On special education, this Congress, about 40 years ago, said we were going to provide up to 40 percent of the difference in the cost of educating kids with disabilities when they were mainstreamed in our schools. We wanted to put behind us the dark history of the segregation and isolation of kids with disabilities who were taken away from their homes, taken away from their neighborhoods, and sent away across the State to schools for the deaf, schools for the blind or maybe a lot of times were not even given an education.
So about 40 years ago, this Congress decided we were going to meet our constitutional requirements and make sure kids with disabilities had equal and appropriate education. But in doing so, we were going to help the States by providing up to 40 percent of the additional costs of special education.
Well, the high mark has been about 18 percent. That was about 3 or 4 years ago, if I am not mistaken--3 or 4 years ago. Since then, we have gone backward. We are now down, under the Bush budget, to 16 percent. So we are going in the wrong direction. So what President Bush's budget did is slashed $291 million for special education. What we have done is add $509 million to State grants to help our beleaguered property taxpayers in New Jersey and Iowa and all across this country, to help them meet the educational needs of our kids with disabilities. So we met our obligations there. The President did not.
On Social Security, we now know people are waiting as much as 15 months to get their cases heard. There is a backlog of several hundred thousand right now. If we do not add the necessary personnel, people are not going to get it, and maybe some of them will die in the meantime. I don't know. People keep getting more and more backlogged and get frustrated by this system. They should not have to do that. People paid in all their lives to Social Security. They ought to get their cases heard in a timely manner. So what we did is we added enough
to cut down on the delays. The President's budget would not do that.
On community health centers, again, the President, when he became President, said he wanted to have a community health center in every poor area in the country. I applauded loudly for that. I thought at least here is something the President and we could agree on.
Well, what does the President's budget do? There is no increase at all for community health centers, not a dime. So we put in $225 million more to increase funding new community health centers in some of our poorer areas of this country. So we met our obligation there, also, in terms of meeting health care needs of people who do not have anywhere else to go.
The Head Start Program, which has proven its worth clear back to the Great Society. It is one of the Great Society programs. The President's budget cut Head Start by $100 million--cut it by $100 million--leaving thousands of kids behind. In our conference report, we have increased it by $153 million--not nearly what we need to meet the needs of all the kids who want to get into Head Start, but at least under our tight budget requirements, we were able to increase it substantially. So we met our obligations there in Head Start.
So these are some parts of the budget I want Senators to know about. There is a lot of other stuff, too, but these items kind of highlight the difference between where we are in this conference report and where the President's budget is.
Again, I thank Senator Specter for the close working relationship we have had. This has been a bipartisan effort from the beginning to right now. Again, that is why I urge all Senators to support this conference report.
Now, the President said he is going to veto it because he said our bill had too much social spending. I would like to ask him to define what he means by ``social spending.'' The way he said it was almost like we were funding ice cream socials or something like that in this bill. Again, this is out of bounds, out of touch. It shows how isolated President Bush has become. Every additional dime we have put in goes to bedrock, essential programs and services this Congress and this President and other Presidents have always supported.
It is interesting that in the last 5, 6 years, the President has not vetoed any appropriations bills. When the Republicans were in charge, the President did not veto an appropriations bill, even though they were over what his budget requests were.
Lo and behold, the Democrats, because of the last election, now control the House and the Senate, and the President said he is going to veto every one of them, except Defense, I guess, maybe Military Construction-VA. All the other ones he is going to veto. He is going to veto the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill because it has ``too much social spending.'' Yet he signed all the other bills before this year.
I find that more than passing strange that the President, this year, says he is going to veto it. Well, it all adds up to politics. Evidently, the President and his advisers think somehow they are going to get some kind of political gain--some kind of political gain--by vetoing our bill for Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor.
Well, I do not know what kind of calculus goes into that, but it is bad calculus. It is bad calculus if the President thinks he might make some political gain by cutting Head Start Programs or by cutting special education or by cutting funding for the National Institutes of Health because it is over his budget, it is ``too much.'' Well, he never said that before. He never said that before to any Republican appropriations bill that passed in the last 5 years. I guess only because the Democrats are in charge he wants to veto it.
I would say to the President: This is not a Democratic bill. Yes, we may be in charge because of the election last year, but I still point out that this bill passed the Senate with 75 votes. As I said earlier, there were five missing who would have voted for it. It would have been 80 to 20. You cannot get much more bipartisan than that. It is not a Democratic bill.
Senator Specter and I and other people worked very hard on this bill. So I do not see where the President comes across in saying he is going to veto it. I think the President is so isolated, so out of touch that someone said: Well, this is over your budget, so you have to veto it. And he said: OK. Fine, I will do it.
Well, again, the other thing is, when the President sent down his first veto message on this bill, he said he was going to veto it because of two things. He was going to veto it because we had included a provision dealing with stem cell research, which he was opposed to and because it was over his budget.
Well, both Senator Specter and I agreed in the beginning--even though we both feel very strongly about overcoming the President's dictates on stopping funding for stem cell research--even though we feel strongly about that, we were willing to go halfway to meet the President. We said: OK, we will take the stem cell portion out of here. So we would like to meet you halfway. Well, what we heard from the White House was: That is not enough. It has to be all his way, all the President's way.
Well, that is not the way we do things around here. We compromise. The art of democratic rule is to make our compromises. So I figured, if we gave up on our stem cell, then he might give up a little bit on his. But that is not the way the President sees it. It has to be all his way or no way.
Again, we do not do business like that around here. As I said, we have a farm bill on the floor this year that I am also chairing, and it is not all I want, it is not all anybody wants. In the farm bill, we have to make our compromises and agreements to get the job done.
But this President is unwilling--unwilling--to compromise, unwilling to sit down with us and hammer out some kind of a reasonable compromise.
So we are left with only one course of action. We have to fulfill our constitutional responsibilities as appropriators to fund the Government, to fund that which Senators and Congresspeople think are priorities and, yes, that the administration also thinks are priorities. So our constitutional obligation is to work these things out and get the best bill we can that people agree upon. As I said, with 75 votes, you can't get much better than that. So I guess we are left with only one course of action: Pass our bill and get it to the President, and I guess he will veto it. It doesn't make sense to me. It makes no sense for the President to veto this bill. As I said, I can't figure out what he--and then to veto it without saying: Let's sit down and work and maybe we can get some agreement. That has not happened. So, again, we are left with only one course of action: Pass the bill, the conference report. I hope Senators will support it as strongly, if not more strongly, than they supported the original bill that passed in the Senate.
Finally, let me say this: Even with this conference report, we have met all of our pay-go requirements. This bill does not add a single dime to the deficit of this country--not a dime. But by cutting a little bit here and adding there to certain priorities, we were able to get a bill that we basically all agree upon. Would I have liked to have had more in NIH? You bet I would. Would I have liked to have had more in the Head Start Program? Yes, I would have. Would I have liked to have had more for special education? Yes. The President wanted less than that, so we tried to meet him halfway. Yet the President says no, he wants it all his way.
So I hope Senators will support this conference report on Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor overwhelmingly, send it to the President, and hopefully he will change his mind. Hopefully, between now and then, he will think: Well, you know, maybe I should sign it, after all. Hope springs eternal. We will just have to wait and see. If he signs it, God bless him. That is good. We will be done with it, and we will move on to next year. If he vetoes it, well, we will just have to come back and hopefully, with the 75 or 80 votes we have had for it, we will override the veto. It is just not a good way to do things, and it causes the kind of confrontation and it causes the kind of bad things happening in Washington that the people of this country want us to end. They want us to work things out and move things along. We have done it here in the Senate. We have done it in the House with Republicans and Democrats. Now it is up to the President to also sit down and negotiate in good faith.
I yield the floor.
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