Amendments

AMENDMENTS -- (House of Representatives - September 14, 2004)

Under clause 8 of rule XVIII, proposed amendments were submitted as follows:

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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to make a couple of observations, in a sense give a progress report on what has happened on this bill so far, given what the Rules Committee did in exposing this bill to these points of order. There are a lot of things that have happened to this bill so far, but I would like to simply talk about the values that have led the House at this point to strike certain programs from the bill, while not striking others.

As I understand the actions that have been taken so far by points of order raised by Members of the majority, as I understand it, we have so far eliminated formula highway grants to the States; we have done serious damage to the essential airline service for small rural airports; we have done significant damage to FAA grants for airports, all of which will impact States' and localities' ability to develop their economies. But let me describe something that has not been eliminated from this bill.

This bill still contains-and it is interesting that this provision was not stricken by any of those who lodged their motions-this bill contains a provision that extends government-offered reduced rate insurance for airlines operating in the domestic United States. Premiums are set under that program at no more than twice what commercial rates were 3 years ago. This means that airlines only pay about one-fifth what they would pay if they were forced to obtain their insurance from the private sector.

My understanding is that this year airlines will pay about $150 million for government-subsidized risk insurance as opposed to $700 million they would have to pay on the open market. So, once again, we are keeping a let-us-pretend industry afloat, an industry which for all practical purposes is bankrupt. All you have to do is watch what has happened with USAir, I do not know how many times USAir, Continental will go bankrupt before they are bankrupt; but all you have to do is watch that to understand that if you are big enough in this society, you have a safety net created which holds you up no matter how many times you tend to fall. But we do not provide that same kind of safety net to average workers in this country.

What it demonstrates, for instance, is that the Federal Government is now willing to provide this huge subsidy in order to provide insurance to big airline corporations around the world or around the country, at the same time that this Congress continuously refuses to provide health insurance for 45 million Americans. I find that distinction interesting. I do not find it surprising, given the values of this Congress that I have come to expect, unfortunately; but it does say something about our national priorities.

If we are willing to exempt from our parliamentary purity our concern about language in this bill when it affects some of the big industries in the country, but we are not willing to skip over it when it comes to inconveniencing and damaging State economies and the transportation ability of small units of government, I find it especially interesting that while the Congress continues to deny actions that would provide health insurance for the 45 million Americans who do not have it, and every time we talk about doing that work we are being for socialized medicine; yet we are willing to socialize risk when it comes to insurance costs for the airline industry. That is a great set of values, isn't it?

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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to note my agreement with the comments of the distinguished gentleman from Florida. Even before this bill came to the floor, we were faced with the prospect of having a miserable record in producing appropriation bills and finishing them before the end of the fiscal year before we go home to face our constituents in the new elections.

The House has passed all but, I believe, two appropriation bills, this one and the VA-HUD bill. And many of the bills that have passed have, I think, been in pitiful shape, but at least they have passed. None of them, except Defense, has been signed into law.

This bill was at least on track to pass in inadequate though meaningful form before we leave here for the election, but now, as the gentleman from Florida has said, we are facing an even bleaker situation. We are going to leave here in October with even less of the people's business done than would have been the case if this debacle had not occurred on the floor today.

What has happened is essentially this: The transportation authorizing committee, the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, or the No Transportation, No Infrastructure Committee, as it probably ought to be called, their basic highway authorization, for instance, expired 9 months ago. They have not yet been able to renew that basic legislation. The reason for that is that they have a three-corner debate going with themselves.

There is a debate between the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure members in the House, those in the Senate, and the wizards in the White House Budget Office, and none of them want to give. So, as a result, what do we have here? The authorizing committee has not been able to get its job done, so the Committee on Appropriations has tried to at least keep these programs afloat while we continue to go through this Little League debate between the White House and the authorizers.

But in fact now I guess the situation is that if the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure cannot pass their legislation, they do not want anybody else to pass meaningful legislation either, or perhaps they somehow think they are producing leverage for themselves by shredding this bill. This is, as I said earlier, this is a sad case.

My great friend and mentor Dick Bolling, who used to be the chairman of the Committee on Rules, and in my view is the greatest Member of this body who never became Speaker. Dick Bolling used to deride Members who practiced what he called dung hill politics, Members who were more interested in protecting the jurisdiction of their own committee than they were in protecting the legislative reputation and record of the House as a whole.

What we have seen today is a sad, sad example of what Dick Bolling worried about when he referred to that practice of "dung hill politics." I wish the House were in a more mature mood, and I wish that the leadership had led so we could have avoided this point today.

There is no point, in my view, in proceeding further with this bill. I intend to vote against it on final passage because there will be nothing left of it except the title. We have a motion around here called "striking the enacting clause." Instead, I suggest today we should probably strike everything except the enacting clause because we will have almost done that by the time we get to the last page of this bill. All we will have done is waste a day and a half of the House's time when we could have been dealing with more serious business, and that, indeed, is a shame.

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