Providing for Consideration of Conference Report on S. Con. Res 95, Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2005
PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF CONFERENCE REPORT ON S. CON. RES. 95, CONCURRENT RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2005 -- (House of Representatives - May 19, 2004)
Mr. HASTINGS of Washington. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 649 and ask for its immediate consideration.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes, and I want to thank the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Hastings) for yielding me the customary 30 minutes.
(Mr. McGOVERN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, since this mammoth budget was made available to Members of this House only a couple of hours ago, it is difficult to know exactly what goodies and gimmicks are hidden inside of it. We know enough, however, to know that this Republican budget is bad for the economy, bad for American working families, and bad for the future of this country.
Two months ago, the Republican leadership proposed a budget resolution that had tax cuts that were not paid for and slashed Medicaid by $2 billion. On top of that, that budget did not include any legitimate plan for bringing our country out of the skyrocketing, record deficits, deficits made worse by the policies of this President and this Republican Congress. That budget resolution passed by only three votes.
And now the Republican leadership wants the House to consider a conference report that they claim is very similar to that bill.
Mr. Speaker, that budget was bad then and it is bad now.
This conference report continues the Republican pattern of fiscal mismanagement. Contrary to their claims, this conference report is only a 1-year budget.
Now, we used to consider 10-year budgets so we could fully assess the consequences of our fiscal actions. Then the Republican leadership changed the budgets to 5 years, so they could better mask the long-term impact of their misguided policies. And now we are considering 1-year budgets. What is next, 6-month budgets? 1-week budgets? How about a budget for the next 5 minutes?
This is the worst kind of shell game. It is a gimmick, a smoke screen that the American people will see right through.
It is time the Republicans in this body face the facts. They squandered a $6 trillion surplus, turning it into an almost $3 trillion deficit. This is the most fiscally irresponsible congressional leadership and administration in the history of the United States of America, and now they are seeking to make it worse by continuing to extend tax cuts that are not paid for.
Now, my grandfather always told me, you cannot dig your way out of a hole, and that is exactly where we are today, in a fiscal hole. Extending these various tax cuts without paying for them may make for good press releases, but it is lousy fiscal policy.
And I do not know if my colleagues are aware of the inclusion of the Hastert Rule in this conference report. The Hastert Rule allows this body to raise the debt limit, also known as the national debt, without a direct vote by the Members of this House. In other words, Mr. Speaker, we busted our credit limit and we are giving ourselves an increase without even having the decency of taking responsibility for it. And guess what? We are sending the bill to our kids and our grandkids. That is wrong.
It is important for my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to know that a vote for this conference report is a vote to increase the debt. A "yes" vote will raise the debt over the $8 trillion level for the first time in American history. Now, I hope Members will think long and hard about what kind of future we are creating for our kids and grandkids.
I believe that we have a responsibility to vote up or down on increasing the debt. Burying this debt increase in the conference report shirks the responsibility of the Members of this House.
You know, my Republican friends always complain about protectionists, but this conference report is one of the most protectionist things I have ever seen. But instead of protecting jobs, it protects politically vulnerable Republicans from being forced to vote up or down on increasing the national debt. It protects the Republicans from having to pay for their tax cuts.
And one other thing: As if the policies in this conference report were not bad enough, the Republican leadership added a provision to this rule that closes the conference on the fiscal year 2004 Labor, HHS, and Education bill. My colleagues and many Americans may be asking themselves, is that bill not already law?
Well, the truth is, the provisions that make up the FY 2004 Labor, HHS, and Education appropriations bill were included in the omnibus appropriations bill signed into law early this year. But the conference report on that bill was never formally closed. Under the rules of the House, Members of the majority and minority can still offer motions to instruct. My good friend, the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), has attempted to do just that several times over the past couple of weeks.
Now, adoption of this rule today will formally close the conference, meaning that no Member can instruct conferees on any issue. The motions to instruct by the gentleman from California have focused on the administration's overtime policies. It is clear that the Republican leadership is scared to death of talking about the Bush administration's misguided plan to take away overtime pay for millions of American workers. The purpose of this section in the rule is to muzzle the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) and any other Members who attempt to bring this important issue to the attention of the House and to the American people.
Why is this leadership so afraid of open and fair debate?
Mr. Speaker, this is a bad rule and it is a bad conference report, and I urge my colleagues to vote "no" on the rule.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt), the ranking Democrat on the Committee on the Budget.
(Mr. SPRATT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, at 6:20 a.m. this morning, this budget resolution, the conference report, so-called, was filed. At 7:15 a.m., it was before the Committee on Rules. No one outside the actual drafters of the legislation had had any time to look at its contents.
It only applies to $2.3 trillion of spending authority. Some way to run a railroad.
And now, when the bill comes before the House, it comes because the rules of the House require a 1-day layover for a rule, so that we have a little time at least and not get surprised with provisions that we did not see on quick notice. That was overturned by meeting early this morning, adjourning and meeting again and deeming 1 day to have expired. So this budget resolution comes to us under sham circumstances.
You have to ask why? Why should something of this gravity, of this importance to the fiscal policy of this country come to us under these circumstances? And there is only one answer I can give you. It will not stand scrutiny. It simply will not stand scrutiny.
The Budget Act calls for spending in major functions of the budget, about 19 all together, and it calls for revenues, and it calls for those expenditures and revenues to be taken function by function and spread out, projected out over a period of 5 years. This budget resolution has real numbers for only 1 year. It is not extended out with real numbers. It has plugged numbers, but not real numbers. For only 1 year are there real numbers.
For the first time in 20 years, we will take up today, if this rule passes, a budget resolution that does not contain a 5-year run-out of the spending levels that we are approving.
In addition, when we set out with this budget, it was recognized that there were some budget process rules we adopted in the 1990s that worked and had a profound effect on our ability to move the budget from a deficit of $290 billion to a surplus of $236 billion in the year 2000. One of those rules was the so-called PAYGO rule which says, if you want to cut taxes and you have a deficit, you have to offset the cut in taxes with an increase elsewhere, or at least with a cut in entitlement spending that is commensurate to your tax revenue cut.
That rule no longer applies because it has legislatively expired. We have tried and tried to restore that rule so that we can put some discipline, some starch into the process here in the House, and we have not succeeded because of opposition on the other side.
What we now get in this so-called budget resolution is an extension of the PAYGO bill, the PAYGO rule for 1 year that applies in one House. It will not apply here in the House of Representatives. That means all sorts of tax cuts can still originate in the House of Representatives, will not be subject to a PAYGO point of order, can be sent to the Senate; there they may be defeated on 60-vote PAYGO point of order, but otherwise we have a crippled, broken-down PAYGO rule that applies for only 1 year.
When you read this bill, this resolution, and see what little it contains, you have to ask yourself, why bring it up at all? If you are not going to comply with the Budget Act, if you are not going to give 5-year extensions, if you are not going to use real numbers, if you are not going to extend PAYGO, why bring it up at all? Well, it does a couple of things. It allows you to claim that you are doing a budget resolution without doing the single most important objective in a budget resolution, and that is laying down a plan for erasing this huge deficit we have.
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Members should understand that if they vote for this budget resolution, they will be voting to have a deficit next year of $367 billion by the calculation of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. That includes an offset in Social Security. If they wipe out the offset in Social Security, the total deficit would be $541 billion.
And guess what, because of deficits we have sustained every year, we are right up against the statutory ceiling for the national debt. It has to be raised and raised soon, or we will bump the ceiling again. And guess what, if Members vote for this resolution, buried under all of these plug numbers, these phony numbers, buried under them is a critically important feature and that is it will indirectly trigger an increase in the debt ceiling. At least with respect to the House of Representatives, we will be deemed to have voted for an increase in the debt ceiling of $690 billion. I am putting Members on notice of that.
So Members who vote for this resolution should know there is a critical working component of it and Members will vote to raise the debt ceiling by $690 billion to $8.1 trillion.
So in a thumbnail, here is what you will be voting for when you vote for this sham resolution: First, Members will vote to raise the deficit to $541 billion without Social Security, for $367 billion including Social Security, add $25 billion more in supplementals for defense, and we are right back up to a $400 billion deficit.
Members will not be voting for any plan in process, any solution to the deficit, but will be putting us on a path, according to the Congressional Budget Office, of accumulating, and this is their number, $5.132 trillion over the next 10 fiscal years.
That is what Members will be voting for if they vote for this resolution. It would be better that we vote down this resolution, send the conferees back to conference and tell them to do what the Budget Act requires them to do and tell them to get a handle on the deficit and put our fiscal house in order. Vote against the rule.
Mr. HASTINGS of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller).
(Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, for all of the reasons mentioned by the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern) and the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt), not only does this budget resolution graphically demonstrate the incompetency of the Republicans to deal with the budget of this country and the budget resolution in this House, but it does something much more sinister than that.
Buried in this resolution is the prohibition against any votes to be taken in the House of Representatives against the provisions offered by the administration, the rules that they put forth to deny millions of working people in this country the right to overtime. When these rules go into effect, if we cannot vote against them as the Senate has voted against them, when these rules go into effect, millions of Americans will be required to work overtime in the future; they just will not get overtime pay.
That means for millions of America's families, families that use overtime that is so important to them to qualify for the mortgages on their house, to qualify to buy an automobile, to put their kids through school, they are not going to have that in their paycheck in the future because they are going to be excluded from being eligible for overtime.
Now the Senate addressed this rule, and they voted against it. They voted to change it. We fought hard against the original rule because the original rule would have excluded maybe 11 million Americans from the right to have overtime pay when they work overtime. Americans understand why they get overtime pay, because when their employer comes and says they have to work late on Thursday night or Friday night, that means they have to rearrange their child care, that means they have to rearrange their ability to spend time with their family, that may mean they have to rearrange their doctor's appointments, and you have to change your life around for the convenience of the employer.
So you get overtime pay.
Now when the employer comes to the worker and says he or she has to work overtime, there will be no overtime pay. That is why this House and the Senate defeated those rules on a bipartisan basis, and the administration now has come up with a new rule. And we find out that even the new rule excludes millions of hard-working Americans from overtime pay, people struggling to hold onto a middle-class lifestyle and standard of living for their families. That is about to evaporate. That is about to evaporate because this House will not allow us, the Republican leadership will not allow us to have an up-or-down vote.
We are fighting so hard for democracy in Iraq, but we cannot have an up-or-down vote in the House of Representatives. We cannot have an up-or-down vote. We cannot have an up-or-down vote because the majority, on a bipartisan basis, will vote to overturn these rules. By a vote of 99-0, the Senate voted to change these rules and exclude from the impact of these rules, to try to save these middle-class families, computer programmers, licensed practical nurses, nurse midwives, oil and gas pipeline workers, oil and gas field workers, oil platform workers, refinery workers. Get the message here?
Millions of hard-working Americans, the Senate voted 99-0 to exclude steelworkers, shipyard workers, teachers, technicians, journalists, chefs, cooks, police officers, firefighters, fire sergeants, police sergeants, emergency medical technicians; 99 to nothing the Senate voted, that means bipartisan. That means all of the Republicans and all of the Democrats voted to protect these workers and their families. In the House of Representatives, the Republicans will not let Members have a vote on this.
We tried twice in the last week to have a vote, and they voted on a partisan straight party line to subject these workers to these rules that will cut their pay this year.
When workers are faced with outsourcing, plant closings, no wage growth, higher health care premiums, now the Republicans have decided to cut their overtime pay. Not only do they show no concern for people who are unemployed; but if you have a job, the Republican's initiative is to cut your pay. But what are they going to do, they are going to continue the cover-up because buried in this rule they have denied the ability of this House to vote on this rule.
Again, the Senate, 99-0, voted to protect construction employees, production line employees, carpenters, mechanics, plumbers, ironworkers, craftsmen, anybody earning an hourly wage because the rule does not protect hourly wage earners. It helps painters, cement masons, stationary engineers, longshoremen, utility workers, welders. Does this sound like Members' constituency? Does this sound like the people who work in our congressional districts every day? Yes, it does.
Mr. Speaker, these are the people who built America, they built the middle class; and now the Republicans are taking away their overtime. But Members will not get to have a vote on that because the Republicans are afraid of the vote. They are afraid of democracy. They are afraid of the people's House working its will so they have shut down the debate and shut down the ability to have a vote.
The Senate had a vote, and they even voted on a bipartisan basis to exclude anybody who has overtime today.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Latham). The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. So apparently the Senate can have bipartisan representation, apparently the Senate can have democracy, but this House cannot have democracy.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman's time has expired. The gentleman will suspend.
Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. ..*
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman will suspend.
Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. ..*
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman will suspend.
Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. ..*
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman will suspend.
Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. ..*
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman will suspend.
POINT OF ORDER
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