Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. FARR. I thank the gentlewoman from Florida for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I rise on this bill, as a member of the subcommittee, with very mixed emotions. There are some very good things in this bill, but there is also some bad stuff. The question is whether the bill is 51 percent good or 51 percent bad.

I came to Congress because I believe that government can play a positive role in American lives. Government is not the enemy.

But it makes me wonder then why this body refuses to invest in the tools to do the job of government and, by extension, to do the job of the American people. This bill contains the same funding levels it did last year, and that is $172 million less than the budget request.

Any good corporation plots its investments so the company can prosper. In terms of the House of Representatives, that would mean setting spending at a level that would maximize its ability to serve the people. By failing to make those investments, we disrespect the American people, and we tell them that we are not worth the investment, not worth the effort, not worth doing the job well.

This bill fails to invest in the very institution we depend upon to make government function properly. This body is being given short shrift.

I am on the Appropriations Committee. I think it is our responsibility to meet the needs of the Nation in every respect, and that includes investing in the legislative branch of government so it can do its job.

Those low polling numbers that Congress gets--everybody here talks about how low it is--I think they are the self-fulfilled policy of a Congress that refuses to provide itself the tools they need to serve the public.

Skimping isn't going to make this place work any better. Using taxpayer dollars more wisely will.

Having said that, I am also supportive of what the committee brought to the floor in a program called the Open World Leadership Center. It is operated out of funds from Congress with the Library of Congress.

What Members may not know is that this program was begun as the brainchild of the late Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and the Librarian of Congress. It was to expose young and emerging leaders--average age about 38--in Russia and former Eastern bloc countries. Some of those countries include Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Kazakhstan.

I think President Putin would love to see this program go away, the way USAID has left the region.

It makes a difference to those young leaders to visit congressional districts, to see how city councils work, to see how school boards work, to see the United States, the State legislators, the judges. The program belongs in the legislative branch because peer-to-peer relationships do work.

The program reaches out to all 50 States. More than 23,000 rising leaders have been hosted by the United States Government since the program's inception. Eighty percent of those have met with Members of Congress and visited their congressional districts. This is a very robust exchange program.

I had a group in my district out in the central coast of California, and one of the visitors had been a member of the Duma, their Congress. He told me that he had been invited by our country to be here at least about a dozen times. But only in visiting the communities and seeing the local government in action did he actually understand what democracy was all about, a bottom's-up process in America that is never learned just visiting Washington or getting taught in a classroom. The value of hands-on, from-the-ground-up democracy is a lesson that can't be learned from a book. Open World experiences show these participants that democracy is not just a dream. It is actually a working reality, one that they can have in their home countries if they work at it. And America shows them how.

There is an amendment coming up, the Ratcliffe amendment, and I hope that all the Members of Congress will reject that amendment to delete this program.

Mr. Chairman, I really appreciate the work of the gentleman from Georgia, our new chairman. He has done a great job. I hope that we will spend, though, a little bit more money investing in this institution so that we can get the job done, not just talk about how we can cut, squeeze, and trim, sacrificing the ability of Congress to be its best.

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Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I would just like to respond that there is no legislative program in the State Department like this. You can't transfer it there. They are not operative in these countries, so to say that this could be moved over--look, you were in professional organizations.

This is legislator to legislator, judge to judge, and we need to keep it that way.

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Mr. FARR. Mr. Chair, I wish the gentlewoman had made that same speech when we were discussing defense, the biggest spending bill we have, but she didn't offer this amendment at all.

I happen to come from a State where the legislators didn't have enough guts to raise taxes, so the people went out and did it because they want their government to run wisely and smartly, and they knew they didn't have enough money to do it.

Look, we are cutting this budget; yet the Senate, which we don't vote on their bit, is increasing their budget by 12 percent. They are going to be able to give cost-of-living adjustments to every one of their Members. Nobody sitting in this room who works for us is going to get a cost-of-living adjustment because of cuts like this. This is ridiculous. We are penalizing our whole House, not the Senate. This is not a smart way to make legislative business.

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