Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008--Conference Report

Floor Speech

Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008--Conference Report

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Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I rise as the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak on the conference report. I am following my chairman of his subcommittee. I hope very much that we will be able to take up this bill, which is our subcommittee, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, separately, as everyone, I believe, knows in their heart is the right thing to do.

This bill is a bill that has been agreed to. We have worked on a bipartisan basis. We very quickly came to a conclusion in the conference on the Military Construction and Veterans' Administration bill. In fact, the President said right out that he would sign the bill, even though it is almost $4 billion more than he had requested, because he understands the urgency of both bills--Veterans' Administration and the Military Construction--and he knows that it is important to do it right away. So he said right up front that he would sign our bill. But he also said right up front that he would not sign the Labor and Health and Human Services bill. So there would be no reason--no common sense or substantive reason--to combine these two bills.

It is incomprehensible to me that the leadership in the House decided to do this. In fact, they also put the Defense appropriations bill as a part of the Labor and Health and Human Services bill, but the Democratic chairman of the Defense bill agreed with the Republican ranking member, and they were able to take the Defense bill out.

For the very same reason, we should be taking the Veterans-Military Construction bill out from under the bill the President has said he will veto. The President will sign the Defense bill and the Military Construction-Veterans bill. Why not have this Congress come together and accomplish something? Two major parts of our Government--it happens that it is the two parts that fund our warriors who are in the field, in harm's way right now--those could be signed right away. Why not do it? I hope the Congress will come to its senses and move in a bipartisan way, swiftly, to do this very thing.

Let me talk about the bills themselves. Military construction: With the impending return of troops resulting from the current overseas rebasing effort through BRAC and the global war on terror, our service men and women are in a time of great transformation. The military construction section of our bill provides $21 billion for construction projects to support these moves and bring our troops home. I cannot emphasize enough that we must stay on schedule. It is important that the military services receive the facilities they need to bring our troops home, where they have better training facilities, a better quality of life for themselves and their families. From operational building to many childcare centers, we have necessary facilities in the bill to do that. Service members, families, and local communities across our country are counting on us.

Now, Congress set a deadline of 2011 for BRAC to be implemented. Yet we see Congress is dragging its feet in the funding requirements to implement the BRAC. We have given the Department their mandate. We must follow through with the money needed. Many of us have visited bases in Europe, Korea, and throughout the world. We know there are training constraints in many of those bases; that our service men and women are not able to stay in training. Sometimes it is a constraint in airspace. Sometimes it is an environmental problem. Sometimes it is a constraint in ground space and artillery space, so that we can be fully trained when we go into harm's way.

The reason the Department of Defense made the announcement after our Congress passed the overseas basing commission amendment to the Defense authorization bill--the reason the Department of Defense announced that 70,000 troops would be brought home from Germany and Korea is because they agreed that the training constraints would make it impossible for us to keep our troops fully trained for the combat into which they will be going. So it is important that we fund this, that we do it on a timely basis, and that we move swiftly on the military construction part of the bill.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is the other part of this unit. I know there is a concern over total discretionary spending in all of the appropriations bills. But the President has said he will sign this bill. With the money appropriated, the Department of Veterans Affairs will be able to address the needs of over 7 million veterans who count on us to provide the funds necessary for medical care, medical facilities, research, extended care facilities, and even cemeteries. The appropriations increases in the bill are in areas I support.

We will always do what is necessary to take care of our veterans and their health care needs. The research of the Veterans' Administration into prosthetics, severe trauma, and traumatic brain injury is cutting edge. Increasing resources in these programs is a good investment for our Nation's veterans and our Nation's future. We are asking the VA to expand research in several areas, including post-traumatic stress syndrome, gulf war illness, prosthetics, and geriatric care. These are the types of injuries the warriors of today are sustaining. These are the warriors in the war on terror. These are the injuries we should be looking for the very best ways to treat, and also the way to rehabilitate our injured warriors with better prostheses, better artificial arms and legs, so they can have a more normal life because they have given so much for our country.

I think every Member of Congress shares the desire to fairly compensate, medically treat, and honor our veterans. The Veterans' Administration provides the health care to address the illnesses or disabilities, physical or mental, including those illnesses that might manifest themselves decades after military service, which is something we also see happening. We always have, and always will, take care of our Nation's veterans. Every veteran should know we are committed to nothing less.

Mr. President, this Congress has shown its resolve time and again to care for our men and women in uniform, as well as the more than 7 million veterans. We owe them our gratitude. We will do our part to take care of them. I ask that we work together to put our service members and veterans first, to do what is best for them and our country.

Mr. President, I will make the point of order at the appropriate time to separate these two distinct bills. The

Veterans-Military Construction bill and the Labor-Health and Human Services bill are separate bills. We have separate committees, and we have dealt with the two committees separately. There is no reason to put them together, particularly when the President has said he will sign the Veterans-Military Construction bill, and he will veto the Labor-Health and Human Services bill.

Why do we delay and put our military service men and women and their families and our veterans in a situation where they are in limbo? Why not pass the bill separately because the bill is ready to go? We have worked in a bipartisan way to assure that it is.

There is no common sense nor substantive reason to put these bills together. So I will leave it up to others to determine why the leadership in the House would have lumped these bills together. I will also say that I respect the Defense Appropriations Committee chairman and ranking member for coming together on a bipartisan basis to take their bill out because that is exactly what should have happened. I hope we will do the same thing for our military veterans and our service men and women who rely on the construction projects and military construction to provide the housing, training facilities, childcare centers, and health care centers, which are necessary for them and their families to have the quality care they so richly deserve for what they are doing for our country right now.

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Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I rise to speak against the waiver of the point of order--the waiver being the motion from the Senator from Iowa. I agree in part and disagree in part with the acting chairman of the Military Construction-Veterans Affairs Subcommittee.

Mr. President, two bills were passed by the Senate--one for Labor-Health and Human Services and one for Military Construction-Veterans Affairs. They are two separate bills because they are very different in nature. They cover very different areas. There was nothing in the bills that was the same. They are separate subjects, and they should be passed in the regular order.

I have heard criticism on the Senate floor and also in the conference committee of the President of the United States, as if he had told Congress not to combine these bills. The President never said any such thing. The President did exactly what I would expect a President to do in his relations with Congress and its understanding of the role of our two different branches of government--executive and legislative. The fact is, Congress chose to take two separate bills and put them together. All the President did was exactly what he should have done. He advised Congress that he was going to veto the Labor-Health and Human Services bill because it was nearly $12 billion over his budget request. When Congress said: OK, Mr. President, we are going to combine the bill that you have notified us you are going to veto with a bill that you have notified us you will sign, which is the Military Construction-Veterans Affairs bill, the President merely said: I have said I am going to veto the Labor-Health and Human Services bill, and I am putting Congress on notice. Congress can make the decision about how it wants to send the bills forward. The President can inform Congress of what he is going to do, which I think, frankly, is an advantage in that he has told us. The worst thing would be if he didn't tell us, if he just surprised us after we had worked in good faith on these bills. But he is not surprising us. He is telling us this is what he is going to do, and if we decide to play a game by putting two bills together, when he has told us he is going to veto one of them, the consequence will be that both bills are vetoed instead of just one.

Let's not put the President in this debate. The President is doing exactly what he should do. The Congress should do what is right. Congress knows the funding for military construction and the veterans is crucial, that there are new things in this bill that are not currently able to be funded. And the sooner we get this bill to the President, the sooner he can sign it, and we can provide these new priorities.

Where I agree with my distinguished acting chairman of the committee is that the bill is a good bill. We have come together in a very bipartisan way. We have worked out our differences, and we didn't have differences on the Senate side. We worked together on a very solid bill. We worked out our differences with the House on a bipartisan basis. The President agreed with us that it is a good bill. We all recognize that some of the best parts of the bill would be lost if there were another continuing resolution for Fiscal Year 2008.

Delaying base-closing commission implementation: As a Congress, we have required the Department of Defense to complete the implementation of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission report by 2011. Every day, every week, every month that we delay the BRAC funding is going to delay that implementation process. It is very important that we give our troops who are going to be coming back from bases in Germany and Korea the housing, the health care facilities, and the childcare centers that will provide a quality of life for our military personnel and their families. We owe them that, Mr. President.

We could send this bill to the President before the end of the week and make sure they have that funding. It is our responsibility to do it. It is our responsibility to do it in the regular order, when the regular order will give us a Presidential signature. It will also provide new research, new treatments, and added facilities for our veterans. We know our veterans are suffering from different kinds of injuries than in previous wars. We know we are saving more lives, but a higher percentage of our wounded veterans are returning home with burns, loss of limbs, traumatic brain injuries, and mental health problems. We know that. So we provide for that in this bill. We have done it in a bipartisan way. We have provided more treatment, more facilities, more emphasis, and more research on post-traumatic stress syndrome, traumatic brain injuries, better prosthetics, artificial legs and arms that are lost by the bombs being used by the insurgents. All of that is in this bill, which could go through on its own in the regular order and be signed by the President.

One of the things we have heard from our veterans month after month after month is how long it is taking them to get through the system from when they leave military service to begin receiving their benefits and even to enter into the VA health care system. It is ridiculous for them to wait months and months when we should have a seamless transition. What our bill provides is more employees to cut that backlog and give these new veterans who are coming into the system the opportunity to have a seamless transition. That is in the bill.

If we pass a CR, this year's priorities would not be in it. The bill contains funds to implement the recommendations of the Dole-Shalala Commission. The Dole-Shalala Commission is the Commission that was appointed by the President to look at the best way to improve the care and service we provide to Active Duty Military and veterans who have returned from battle. They made recommendations. They did a thorough study. These are two great Americans: Donna Shalala and Robert Dole. They came up with recommendations, and we begin to fund them in this bill.

Mr. President, why wouldn't we pass this bill as a stand-alone measure when we know it is going to be vetoed if it is combined with the Labor-Health and Human Services bill? It does not pass the smell test to combine these bills when there is no reason to. In the original House action, they combined Health and Human Services with Defense and Military Construction and Veterans. The Defense bill was separated out because the chairman and the ranking member agreed that it had no business under Labor-Health and Human Services. That bill, by agreement, was separated out. We didn't get that agreement on Military Construction. So now we are faced with having a point of order, under the newly passed rule by the Democratic majority, that says you cannot put something in a conference report that has not passed either House in that bill.

So the point of order is going to succeed. We all know it is going to succeed. Why do we play this game? It is a game that is going to affect veterans and military personnel and their quality of life. There is no reason, there is no substantive reason, and there is no logical reason.

I urge my colleagues, let's vote unanimously to separate these bills, send the MILCON and Veterans bill to the House and ask them to quickly appoint conferees. The bill is agreed to. We have hashed out the differences. We can still get this bill to the President before Veterans Day. What a great accomplishment for this Congress, what a great way to say the President and the Congress are in agreement on something. I think the American people are looking for that. We see that the ratings of Congress and the President are at an all-time low. Why not give the American people some confidence that we can accomplish something together for the good of the people? It is very easy, very clear that this is a bill the President says he will sign. Let's send it to him. There can be no logical reason not to.

I urge my colleagues to come together on a bipartisan basis and stop the game playing, especially with our veterans and our military families who are depending upon the new initiatives in this bill to be done, and we have the power to do it. Let's do our jobs.

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