Wainving Points of Order Against Conference Report on H.R. 5631, Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2007

WAIVING POINTS OF ORDER AGAINST CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 5631, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2007 -- (House of Representatives - September 26, 2006)

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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, this rule will allow the House to pass the Department of Defense appropriation bill for the year; and, in addition, it will allow the Congress to move forward with a $70 billion partial payment on the cost of funding the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I would much prefer that we would be paying for the entire year, rather than continuing to see this war financed on the installment plan. We are now reaching almost $500 billion that has been expended on this endeavor, and I think it would be helpful to the American people if they could see the full cost each year, rather than having it dribbed and drabbed out month by month in order to hide the full impact of the cost. This rule also allows the House to consider the continuing resolution for the remainder of the budget.

We will, when the House leaves this week, have passed only two appropriation bills, the defense bill and the homeland security bill. That means the entire domestic portion of the budget plus the bills to finance foreign operations and State Department operations will be delayed until after the election, well into the fiscal year.

Now, the majority leader in the Senate, Senator Frist, I note yesterday objected to the ``obstructive tactics'' of the Democratic minority on appropriation bills. I want to point out no one in this House is going to be able to point to a single instance in which the minority party has delayed consideration of any appropriation bill. In fact, we can point to at least 16 occasions on which the minority accelerated or helped to move forward the appropriation bills. That does not mean we always voted for them. We voted for some and against others. But I made the point at the beginning of the year that we were going to cooperate fully procedurally because at the end of the year I wanted people to understand that if these bills were not passed that the responsibility would lie with the majority party. And it has.

Now the responsibility does not lie with the majority appropriators. The problem is that this House started out the year with the majority party leadership allowing the strong right wing of their caucus to dictate the content of the budget resolution, and that budget resolution was incredibly unrealistic.

Now, as a result, we find the Senate counterparts of our friends on the majority side of the aisle who are reluctant to go on record endorsing many of the actions that were required by that budget resolution in the appropriations process. And so they prefer to push it past the election so that there will be no accountability for most of the actions taken by Congress on the domestic portion of the budget.

There will be no final accountability with respect to the number of research grants that are cut from NIH below the base 3 years ago. There will be no accountability for the fact that No Child Left Behind education funds are short-sheeted by over $1 billion. There will be no accountability for thousands of other decisions made in the domestic budget, because all of those final decisions have been postponed until after the election when you can then bring bills up for a vote without having any political consequence. I think that is unfortunate, and I would simply say that this demonstrates what happens when the priority of the majority party is simply to deliver king-size tax cuts to persons making over a million bucks a year.

The minority party throughout has tried to show that we could meet our responsibilities in education, in health care, in science, in agriculture, and in other areas by having a very modest cutback in the size of tax cuts that are aimed at those folks who are in the top 1 percent of earners in this country, in fact, even better than the top 1 percent, those who make $1 million or more a year. And I would venture to say that I think if you asked most of those people they would say ``We don't need a tax cut quite that large as long as you are taking care of the middle-class folks. Instead, use that money to meet these responsibilities.''

Unfortunately, the Congress has chosen not to do that. So, once again, we have to finance the entire domestic portion of the budget on a continuing resolution, hiding until after the election all the multiple decisions that I thought we were so eager to make when we ran for election 2 years ago.

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