[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 30 (Thursday, March 7, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1642-S1643]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     THE OMNIBUS APPROPRIATIONS ACT

  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I hope that my distinguished friend from 
Missouri and my friend from Montana will attend my remarks for just a 
moment, and perhaps comment on them, just as they have on one another's 
with respect to the bill that they have been so eloquently attempting 
to move to passage.
  Just a few moments ago, the distinguished chairman of the 
Appropriations Committee, Senator Hatfield, appeared on the floor with 
the extraordinary news that the administration had expressed its 
unwavering intention to veto the omnibus appropriations bill that was 
reported by the Senate Appropriations Committee just yesterday.
  The Senator from Oregon pointed out that appropriations, the spending 
authorization for the spending of money, is the prerogative of 
Congress. That is perhaps the most fundamental of all the prerogatives 
of Congress, that no President of the United States has ever been able 
to or can now or will be able to in the future force the Congress to 
pass an appropriation at a level that the President wishes.
  But my distinguished chairman and friend from Oregon, I do not think, 
reached the true depths of the arrogance of this veto threat. So while 
he was speaking, I got out our publication, our committee report, on 
the subject. I discovered that the total amount of money that we 
proposed to allow the President of the United States to spend during 
the current fiscal year in that bill, for five different agencies, is 
$164 billion, approximately $164 billion, approximately $164 billion, 
of which a little less than $5 billion is restricted and cannot be 
spent unless the President reaches an agreement with Congress on a 
balanced budget at some time in the future.

  The President of the United States has said that he will veto this 
bill unless we allow him to spend $166 billion instead of $164 billion 
without any restrictions, without any commitment on his part, without 
any agreement with the Congress with respect to a balanced budget in 
the future.
  I must say that I find this to be absolutely extraordinary and 
without precedent, that a President of the United States should, once 
again, threaten to close down five major units of our Government 
because we propose to allow him to spend $164 billion and he wants to 
spend $166 billion.
  I know that each of my colleagues here on the floor is a chairman of 
a subcommittee on the Appropriations Committee, as am I. The Senator 
from Missouri and I are chairmen of subcommittees whose bills are a 
part of this overall bill. But I just wonder whether they agree with me 
or not that it is practically beyond belief that a President of the 
United States should threaten this whole range of programs in all of 
our areas on which we are willing to spend $164 billion just as he is 
willing to commit himself at some point or another to a balanced 
budget, and the great bulk of that, $159 billion anyway, whether he 
agrees or not, just because we will not spend $2 billion more than he 
wants.
  Mr. BURNS. If the Senator from Washington will yield.
  Mr. GORTON. I will yield.
  Mr. BURNS. I do not know where he wants to spend the $2 billion. He 
was not specific about that, I ask?
  Mr. GORTON. I believe he was specific about it. Perhaps a few hundred 
million were in the field of the Senator from Missouri. Others were in 
social and health services.
  My own responsibility for the Department of Interior and related 
agencies, where we are willing to spend $12.5 billion, is maybe $200 
million more than he wants to spend over and above $12.5 billion; in 
other words, 1 or 2 percent more money than we are authorizing for him, 
and yet he threatens to veto this entire bill because he cannot spend 
every dime that he wishes to spend.
  Mr. BURNS. I congratulate the Senator from Washington, because I know 
we had to look at Indian schools, we had to look at the Indian Health 
Service. Those areas suffered cuts last year, and we tried to add some 
money back and were successful in doing that, and we get this close.
  I am wondering, though, if we are not sort of lapping over into the 
political world rather than the world of reality or this world of 
trying to finance the Government and make it work.
  Mr. GORTON. It seems to me that is the most apt comment on the 
subject.
  Mr. BOND. Mr. President, if the Senator from Washington will yield.
  Mr. GORTON. He will.
  Mr. BOND. The thing that is striking to me is that we have been 
working on these bills for many months. I have been working on the 
title which funds veterans, housing, environment, Federal emergency 
management, and as I think my distinguished colleague knows, we have 
been trying to find out from the administration what they want.
  I remember when our son was 2 or 3 years old, he would come in and 
say he wants more. From a 2- or 3-year-old maybe more is a reasonable 
request, but when you get it from a Budget Director who is supposedly 
supporting a President who now recognizes the need for a balanced 
budget, when the President and the Budget Director refuse to give you 
any specifics, it, to me, is amazing that they can get by with doing 
nothing but issuing veto threats.

  I ask the Senator, maybe he has heard, because I have not heard, from 
the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, of any changes 
that they wish to see so that they can utilize the funds better?
  It is a great gimmick. It is a great political campaign to say, ``I 
am going to spend more on everything. Of course, I'm for a balanced 
budget. Of course, I'm for a balanced budget, but I want to spend more 
on everything.''
  Do they tell you where they want to make any cuts, I ask the Senator? 
Did they tell you where they want to save money?
  Mr. GORTON. For almost a year, this Senator has suggested that within 
the frame of reference of the amount of money available to use for the 
Department of the Interior and related agencies, if the administration 
wanted to shift priorities, then we would be happy, seriously, to 
consider those shifts. None have been proposed.
  Mr. BOND. You have not heard from them either. I thought I was the 
only one who was completely stiffed by them. In November, I put in 
requests. I asked the Agency heads, the Department heads whose budgets 
we fund, ``If there is an adult in supervisory authority, please have 
them contact us and say what changes they want to make.''
  I had a conversation with the Vice President. I said, ``This is a 
process in which the executive and the legislative branches need to sit 
down and compromise.''
  Every government I have ever served in, and I served at the State 
level where I was a Republican chief executive with a Democratically 
controlled

[[Page S1643]]

legislature, we always sat down and worked together, and the people 
expected us to do that.
  How can the people of the United States expect us to negotiate a 
budget or appropriations bills when one side will not even talk to us 
and all they do is send veto threats? I ask my colleague, how do you 
compromise? How do you work with, how do you negotiate with somebody 
who will not talk with you?
  Mr. GORTON. Well, you do not. I must say, I found particularly 
striking the analogy of the Senator from Missouri to a 2- or 3-year-old 
child who simply says, ``More.''
  In this case, what we have is an administration that only says, 
``More. We want more spending, we do not want any setoffs, but we want 
to send the bill to somebody else, to our children and our 
grandchildren. We really do not want a serious proposal that will lead 
us to a balanced budget, except maybe after the end of the next 
Presidential term. We will think about binding someone in the future, 
but we don't want to bind ourselves.''
  So we have now in front of us the proposition that $164 billion is 
not enough money to spend, and the President will veto a bill that only 
spends $164 billion, of which $5 billion is fenced, as it were. ``We've 
got to have $166 billion to spend the way we want without any 
conditions imposed on that spending.''
  Again, I think the Senator from Oregon was too polite to say so, but 
I believe that if that is the proposition with which we are faced, it 
is pointless to spend a week or so of this body's time debating the 
details of a proposal which will be vetoed in any event.

  Regrettably, we will perhaps have to approach the President with 
another of these notorious continuing resolutions; that is to say, 
short-term appropriations bills, which--and I think I can speak for my 
colleagues on this side of the aisle--when I say they will be for 
smaller amounts of money, they will be markedly smaller amounts of 
money in authorizations for the administration than is the bill that 
was arrived at working with both Republicans and Democrats in an 
attempt to reach a common ground somewhere between the last set of 
appropriations proposed by this body and those originally asked for by 
the President.
  It is too bad, but here we are with a veto threat over the 
proposition that we are not going to spend $166 billion in exactly the 
way the President wishes but only $164 billion, with $5 billion of it 
contingent upon the President agreeing to a balanced budget at some 
reasonable future time.
  Mr. SIMPSON addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming is recognized.

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