Motion To Instruct Conferees On H.R. 3288, Transportation, Housing And Urban Development, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. OLVER. Madam Speaker, the motion that we have before us is essentially the same motion that we had earlier back in September, September 23, when the Legislative branch appropriations bill was brought to the floor and we were considering doing a continuing resolution for a period of time, which ended up leading to a second continuing resolution at the point that the first one had run out.

The only difference from that motion is that this one now calls for 72 hours rather than 48 hours, thereby making the time constraint a more difficult one given the circumstances that we are in and given the time at which we are supposed to have another continuing resolution run out.

So that's a very small point, because at 48 hours, it would be easier to deal with. Madam Speaker, in a perfect world, we would have 72 hours to further review this bill. However, we cannot guarantee that for the reason that the current CR expires on the 18th and the bills that have been mentioned by the gentleman from Iowa fund critical programs.

The Departments that are funded in these bills cannot wait much longer for the funds, and we want to get the bills enacted for the entire year. It's already December 8. And we need to get these bills done. Plus, we all know that we need to have plenty of time for our colleagues on the Senate side to act.

Now, Madam Speaker, I would just like to point out that in recent years, in 2005--and all of these, of course, were while the present minority was in the majority, and so they were in control of the procedures that were being followed--in 2005, the omnibus at that time included Agriculture, Commerce, Energy-Water, Foreign Operations, Interior, Labor-HHS-Education, the Leg Branch, Transportation, Treasury, VA-HUD and Foreign Operations and that year happened to be the vehicle being used to bring that process to a conclusion.

So the number of bills that were involved in that process were nine plus the vehicle, 10 of the 12 bills. In that instance, the Agriculture bill had never been considered in the Senate; the Commerce, Justice and State bills had never been considered in the Senate. In fact, that was before--that was Justice and Judiciary at that point, it was a more complicated bill. Energy-Water never were considered in the Senate, Interior had never been considered in the Senate, Labor-HHS had never been considered in the Senate, Leg Branch had never appointed conferees, Transportation and Treasury had never been considered in the Senate, and the VA-HUD bill was never considered in either body.

Yet all of those bills were in that continuing resolution. And so this has been done in the past. That was the omnibus bill that finished up our work for the fiscal year 2005 budget.

Going back a year, we considered an appropriations bill to finish up the fiscal year 2004 sequence that included Agriculture, Commerce, State, Justice, District of Columbia, Foreign Operations, Labor-Health-Education, Transportation, Treasury and VA-HUD; and Agriculture was the vehicle. And CJS was never considered in the Senate. D.C. had not appointed conferees. The Foreign Operations bill had appointed conferees, but never reported a conference report. A report had never been agreed to. Labor-HHS, the conferees had been appointed, but then the conference, the conferees discharged from their appointment and brought it back to the full committee. And so VA-HUD never had appointed conferees. And so it goes.

The conferees in these instances included a series of Members from the majority side, from the variety of the committees in each case. At that time, Mr. Young of Florida was the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. And I could go on here. In 2003, the consolidated appropriations resolution that completed the 2003 budgetary events included Agriculture, Commerce, District of Columbia, those were still part of it, except it was still a separate subcommittee, Energy-Water Development, Foreign Operations, Interior, Labor-HHS, Legislative Branch, Transportation, Treasury and Postal Service were now getting back at least two different reorganizations of the jurisdictions of the Appropriations Committee, all during the period that the present minority making the motion was in control and moved very quickly on the actions.

In that year, 2003, every one of the bills that I have mentioned had never been considered in one or the other branch. Several of them had not been considered in the House, and several of them had not been considered in the Senate. Well, I'm wrong actually. In the House, Leg Branch had never appointed conferees, but it had been considered and the bill had been passed. But in the others, the others had never been considered in either House, in one of the two branches at least.

So it is a time-honored process. When one gets here, we have known we've had now for 3 months since the end of the fiscal year, almost 3 months since the end of the fiscal year, and all of these bills have been put forward in conference in continuing resolutions, and the final continuing resolution ends on the 18 of December, 10 days away. The bill that we have before us is the Transportation, Treasury bill.

My ranking member, Mr. Latham, I want to express my strong appreciation for all the work that he has done on the legislation thus far that is the carrying legislation here. And he has mentioned that there are several bills that are being added, and I'm not going to exactly repeat those because they are already now a part of the Record, and they do not complete our--there is one left. There is a Defense bill that is left.

So we are in a time constraint. We need to move. We have a situation that we understand quite well if I were to go through and list the dates on which the Senate acted finally on several of these bills, they have been passed in the Senate in the case of Commerce at least and Veterans Affairs and Military Construction, but they weren't passed in the Senate until well after the end of the fiscal year 2009. All of our bills have been passed through the House by the end of fiscal year 2009. So we were ready to move forward with individual bills at a much earlier stage.

As I have already stated, we cannot guarantee 72 hours. It would be nice in a perfect world to be able to do that. But we must get this legislation done, or we are putting enormous pressures on the executive Departments of this government and on our own procedures as we move forward toward the appropriations process for fiscal year 2011, which comes quickly on the tail of getting finished with the needs that we have for finishing fiscal year 2010.

I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source