Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

FINANCIAL SERVICES AND GENERAL GOVERNMENT APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008 -- (House of Representatives - June 28, 2007)

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

Mr. Chairman, I would like to lay out the context for this debate. Here is the record of our Republican friends when they controlled the House on the question of earmarks. In the last year that our party controlled the House before the Republicans took over, if you take the largest four domestic appropriations bills, there was a total of less than 800 earmarks in those bills. In the last year of the Republican regime in those same bills, there were more than 8,000. That's a thousand percent increase.

In the Labor-Health appropriation bill, the last year I was chairman there were zero earmarks in that bill. The last year that earmarks were considered in the Labor-Health bill under the Republican leadership, there were over 3,000 earmarks.

In addition, earmarks were used for internal blackmail. On one occasion, every Democrat who voted against the Labor-Health-Education bill because it insufficiently funded education and health and job training saw their earmark projects eliminated in retaliation, and I called that at the time internal blackmail.

It was then that I had my staff prepare the first analysis of the growth of earmarks during Republican control of this House.

In addition, we saw earmarks used in order to change votes on Medicare part D, that famous night where the roll call was held open for 3 hours while promises were made in order to turn enough votes around to turn a defeat into a victory for that program.

After the Cunningham affair, our Republican friends announced they were going to attach the names of requesters to the earmarks. But they conveniently declined to make that effective on their watch. So when we came in, the first thing we did was to implement that proposal and require that names be attached to earmarks.

The second thing we did was to impose a moratorium on earmarks until we could straighten out the process.

The third thing we did was announce that we were going to cut them by 50 percent for the appropriate accounts, the nonproject accounts.

The fourth thing we did was to require a certification to make clear that no one had a financial interest in the earmarks that they were seeking.

Then we also provided that, unlike 2 years ago, no provision would be able to be put into a conference report without having a vote on the final product of that conference report by the conferees. That's what we did.

Now the gentleman is making a Federal case out of the fact that I had wanted more time to screen these earmarks which have grown exponentially in order to protect the House from bad choices. Folks on his side of the aisle objected to that, and so we relented and so we now have earmarks in the bill. And now the gentleman is squawking because we have earmarks in the bill just as loudly as he was squawking when we didn't. He's a very hard fellow to please.

Now, what I said a week ago was that I detest the earmark process, and I do. Why? For a number of reasons. Because it requires me as a conscientious chairman of this committee to spend a huge amount of my time simply reading through those things to try to make certain that the House is not embarrassed.

But the more fundamental reason I am frustrated by the process is because it makes so many Members focus so exclusively on the issue of earmarks that we never get a debate on policy, and I thought we came here to debate policy. And that's my problem. I don't think earmarks are evil. I think Members of Congress have a perfect constitutional right to request specific funding for a specific project, just as the executive branch does. And I would remind you that the executive branch directs eight times--

The CHAIRMAN. The time of the gentleman has expired.

Mr. SERRANO. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word, and I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. OBEY. I have forgotten where I was, Mr. Chairman. It must be a sign of old age.

What bothers me is I thought we all came here to talk about policy. And so what I said on the floor is that I would like to see once and for all the House put up or shut up on this issue. I would personally prefer there be no earmarks. But as chairman of the committee, I have an obligation to try to find that balance point in the House that reflects the will of the House. I don't have the luxury of pursuing exclusively my own will on a subject. So I have been willing to support bills carrying earmarks even though I don't like what they do to my time and my disposition, to be frank.

So what I said, I want to see an up-or-down on all earmarks. I drafted an amendment to do so and was informed by the Parliamentarian that would be subject to a point of order, and so I chose not to offer an amendment that was an obvious waste of the House's time.

I will say that I am pleased that the gentleman has offered his amendment. Because while it does go as far as mine did, it will give the House an opportunity to decide once and for all, I would hope, whether it favors earmarks or whether it doesn't.

Rather than spending an inordinate amount of the House's time talking about individual earmarks and seeing vote after vote after vote to eliminate them go down to defeat, I think it is about time we find out what the will of the House is. I want to know whether the House wants to proceed with earmarks in these bills or not. I see no problem with their doing so.

But what I will say is if the House does vote for this amendment, then I will see to it that any bill that comes out from now on has no earmarks. So let's be clear about this. If Members don't want their earmarks, then they should vote for the gentleman's amendment. If they do want their earmarks, if they do think that they have as much right as the President of the United States to determine what happens in their district, then I would suggest that they vote against the amendment. But it is time to put up or shut up. It is time to see where the House stands on this issue.

The committee is trying to reflect the will of the House but we cannot go in both directions at the same time. It's time we find out which direction the House wants to go.

I thank the gentleman for the time.

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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, this issue is much ado about nothing. We have been subjected to filibuster by amendment all week, and now we are going to be subjected to 40 minutes of so-called debate on a nonexistent issue. Now, why is this issue here?

There isn't anybody in the Congress that I know of who is trying to legislatively resurrect the Fairness Doctrine, and, certainly, the totally Republican-dominated commission is not going to resurrect that doctrine.

What's at stake here is that a certain Senator, who evidently was afflicted by a bad case of being hit by sun spots so he no longer believes that there is anything like global warming, claims that he was in an elevator and overheard a couple of Senators talk about resurrecting the fairness clause. The two Senators involved say that's nonsense.

But what you have got going on here is an effort on the part of right-wing radio to gin up the folks by inventing a fight that doesn't exist. As far as I'm concerned, it's immaterial to me how people vote on this. If Members want the debate to go until 8:00 tonight instead of 7:00, fine, spend 40 minutes debating an issue that doesn't exist.

But what I do find interesting is that folks who scream every day of the week about that so-called ``liberal press,'' all of a sudden they are now saying, ``Oh, my God, can you imagine, somebody might force a fairness doctrine on us.'' Well, one would think that if they really do believe the press is liberal, that they would then want the protection that would come from the Fairness Doctrine.

I think the very fact that they don't want to see the Fairness Doctrine resurrected is, in fact, an open admission that they recognize the radio waves are largely and almost totally dominated by the right and the far right and the off-the-wall right.

I don't see any purpose in taking any more time.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Chairman, as someone of note said a long time ago, it will be little noted nor long remembered what we say here today. Certainly this has not been one of the most scintillating debates in the history of the Republic.

But I do want to thank my friends on the right because if our folks on talk radio and yap yap TV, if they actually believed that there was a fiercely liberal press that dominated the country, then they would be running kicking and screaming, demanding a Fairness Doctrine. And the fact that the folks on talk radio and yap yap TV are doing just the opposite indicates to me that they are publicly admitting that they are not ``fair and balanced.''

A lot of fun has been made of the FCC. It started in 1929, Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover was a very unlucky President who happened to be a very fine man and who had, I think, for his long illustrious life, a pretty good understanding of what it takes to be basically fair in this country. You ought to go back and read some of Herbert Hoover's speeches. He takes a lot of guff, but he was a very impressive man, with a misguided economic policy, but he was a very impressive human being.

When the FCC was created, it was based on the idea that the airwaves, which were being licensed to private holders, were, in fact, property of the public and that it is sort of like our stewardship of the Earth. My religious beliefs tell me that we never really own property even if we have title to it. We lease it from God for a while and we have stewardship responsibility.

Now that, in my view, is the same view that the government had when they started licensing radio stations. What they said to people who stood to make a lot of money with those licenses is, ``Look, if you're going to use the public airwaves, make sure that all sides get a fair shake of the argument. That's what it was all about. It has long since gone by the boards because of court decisions and other administrative actions by various administrations.

Right wing radio today looks at those airwaves as being their open private preserve, and they're not going to give them up at all. But don't worry, I would not, for a second, want to see Rush Limbaugh or good old Sean moderated. I want to see the real, raw Rush. I want him and folks like him to be thoroughly and fully exposed to the American listening audience in all of their bloviating glory. I want to let Rush be Rush. And that isn't going to bother me if he goes on for hours and hours with his one-sided diatribes. Everybody knows he's plugged directly into Republican national headquarters. And so in my view, he is virtually discredited, and I would like to keep it that way.

So all I guess I would say, Mr. Chairman, is that I think we ought to let right wing radio go on just as they do now. Rush and Sean are just about as important in the scheme of things as Paris Hilton. And I would hate to see them gain an ounce of credibility by being forced by a government agency or anybody else to moderate their views enough so that they just might become modestly influential or respectable.

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Mr. OBEY. I won't take the time, let me just simply sum up very briefly.

As the Chair knows, we've gone through the last 30 minutes debating a nonissue. The amendment has already been accepted by the committee. And I would expect that there will be an overwhelmingly vote for it because there is no prospect of any serious effort to revive the Fairness Doctrine, either legislatively or legally. And so, this has really been another political exercise.

I've almost given up expecting that substance will dominate legislative debate. We had a State senator by the name of Lynn Stalbaum, who served in Wisconsin many years ago. And the legislature was covered by a man by the name Aldric Revell. Aldric was an acerbic reporter who had the temperament of H.L. Menkin and a pen to match. And he wrote this about Stalbaum one day, he said, ``Stalbaum is a superb legislator, but he has the maddening tendency to expect reason to dominate legislative debate.''

I don't really expect, on issues like this, to have much common sense in the House. You get six like-minded people in this institution, they talk to each other in the cloakroom and they think they've conducted a public opinion poll.

So all I would say is, I fundamentally disagree with the gentleman who indicated that this is a highly important vote. I think, as another famous author once said, this is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

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Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, these agencies, these regulatory agencies in this bill, are not very well known by the American people, but I think this amendment is consistent with the efforts made by Republican Congresses in the past 25 years to slowly but surely weaken and cripple the ability of regulatory agencies to keep the big boys honest and to protect the little people in this society from abuse and to protect legitimate capitalists from chiseling competitors.

If you take a look at what happened to the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, for instance, from 1980 on, the protective capacity of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission was being shrunk at the same time that America experienced the greatest wave of corporate mergers and corporate acquisitions in the Nation's history. The staff of the Consumer Product Safety Commission during that time was cut in half, since 1980.

And as I said last night, the ability of the SEC to keep up with its workload was crunched because over that same period of time corporate filings reviewed by the Agency declined from 21 percent to about 8 percent in 2000. That means the rest of the filings never even got a look-see.

Now, the Federal Trade Commission: its job is simply to protect the consumers, to protect them against antitrust and a variety of noncompetitive practices. The SEC is charged with the responsibility of protecting investors, so we don't have more Enrons. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission does all these ``terrible'' things like protecting kids from flammable pajamas.

I would simply suggest that you can cut this bill by 1 percent and it won't be noticed much in any immediate year. But you do that for 4 or 5 years in a row and you allow inflation meanwhile to eat away at those regulatory agencies' budgets, and what you have is runaway, ragged individualism and you have the big boys and the big corporations in this society able to get away with murder. These are the agencies that keep those big boys honest.

Now, they say, ``Well, this is just a small cut.'' I would submit we have already cut this bill 3 percent. We cut the President's budget by 3 percent.

And I would further make the point that I think it is a ludicrous joke for the people in this Congress who brought us $1.2 trillion in tax cuts, paid for with borrowed money, for the people who are willing to give $57 billion in tax cuts this year to people who make over a million bucks, with borrowed money, and for people who are willing to borrow $600 billion to finance the dumbest war in modern American history, and then they want to divert public attention by saying, ``Oh, guess what, we didn't cause the $2 trillion increase in Federal debt. What caused it was these terrible Democrats who are in the coming year going to add $5 billion over the CBO baseline.'' That's all the budget does for this year, add $5 billion over the CBO baseline.

So I plead fully guilty of thinking that added investments in veterans, added investments in school kids, added investments in health care, added investments in science, added investments in budgets that help regulatory agencies keep the big boys honest, I plead fully guilty in supporting all of that. It's a whole lot better than their track record on fiscal responsibility.

It is a colossal all-time joke. Never again in my life will I take any lectures from any members of that party on fiscal responsibility after what they've done the last 6 years. You can rewrite history if you want, but ain't nobody gonna read it!

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