Providing for Consideration of H.R. 3288, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010

PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H.R. 3288, TRANSPORTATION, HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2010 -- (House of Representatives - July 23, 2009)

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Mr. FLAKE. Again, I rise today not because this bill may or may not violate the Unfunded Mandates Act--it may or it may not. The question here is why, again, and we're near the end of the appropriations cycle and we've been living under what is the equivalent of legislative martial law, where the majority has stated that they cannot allow appropriation bills to come to the floor because we have to get through this process. We have to move through it. The Appropriations Committee chairman said, There is a limited numbers of hours between now and the time we recess. If we want to get our work done, we have to limit the debate time that we spend on these bills.

Now, appropriating is one of the most--if not the most important--thing that Congress does. We maintain the power of the purse under article 1. This is our responsibility. And to say that we've got to move through it quickly and so we have to deny the minority party the ability to offer the amendments it wants to offer simply because we have to make the trains run on time here.

When the Republicans were in the majority, one Member said the other day that he was in the chair for over 3 days on the interior bill simply because Members on the majority side and the minority side had a lot of amendments they wanted to offer--3 days on the interior bill. Here we're allowing just an afternoon on the THUD bill. We're allowing just less than a day on the defense bill next week that contains more than a thousand earmarks that haven't been vetted by the Appropriations Committee, 540 of which are no-bid contracts to private companies. And we aren't allowing probably but a few, if history holds, amendments to that bill. And they will likely be amendments that the majority chooses.

Last week, on a previous appropriation bill, I asked for unanimous consent 16 times on 16 amendments that I had to allow us to substitute an amendment that one of my colleagues had offered that was not allowed.

So making the point that this isn't an issue of time; the time constraints were already set. We simply wanted to substitute amendments that we thought were maybe more important, that Members were denied the ability to offer, and we were rejected. Objection was raised 16 times to unanimous consent requests simply to substitute amendments. So we know what this is about. It's not about an issue of time, although that is a sorry excuse, frankly. When appropriating dollars is the most important thing we do here, we shouldn't limit ourselves to just a few days to get the appropriations process done on the floor.

But even if you accept that, the minority party simply wanted to offer the amendments it wanted to offer, not the ones that the majority party had chosen for the minority party to offer and were denied 16 times. And here again today we're going to be discussing a bill. More than 70 amendments were offered to the Rules Committee. Only, I believe, 24 were ruled in order. We just had four or five Members offer privileged resolutions to make the point that their amendments, which were germane, which should have been allowed, were not allowed by the minority party.

Madam Speaker, this isn't the way this House ought to be run. We're breaking from tradition here with the appropriations process, and at a time when we need more than ever to scrub these appropriations bills and make sure we're not spending money that we shouldn't be spending. We have a deficit that will near $2 trillion this year. When I came to Congress just 8 years ago, that was almost the entire Federal budget. Now our budget deficit will equal that amount, and yet we're throwing appropriation bills at the floor and saying got to get them done in 1 day and not allow the minority party to offer the amendments that it would like to offer.

I would submit that while the majority party may think that they can get away with it because process arguments don't mean much outside the Beltway, I can see that. But a bad process begets bad policy, and sooner or later, it will come back to bite. And it just doesn't come back to bite the majority party; it comes back to haunt this institution. And institutionally, we ought to be better. We ought to have more regard for this institution than to simply break with precedent like this and deny the minority party the ability to offer the amendments I would like to offer.

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Mr. FLAKE. I yield myself the balance of my time to answer the gentleman.

I want to make the point that I'm not trying to delay the process. I could call a vote and waste 30 minutes. I'm not going to. I know the outcome here. That's not the point. The gentleman mentioned that I've been given a lot of amendments. I have, but it is only because the majority knows that they can beat them. And when I've offered to substitute some of my colleagues' amendments that were germane that simply weren't ruled in order, objection was raised 16 times to do that. So this isn't about time. This is about the majority wanting only the amendments that it wants to see on the floor.

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