[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 12 (Tuesday, February 4, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H247-H248]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   REINTRODUCTION OF LEGISLATION TO END GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWNS FOREVER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 21, 1997, the gentleman from

[[Page H248]]

Pennsylvania [Mr. Gekas] is recognized during morning-hour debates for 
5 minutes.
  Mr. GEKAS. Mr. Speaker, today I will be reintroducing a measure, 
which I have in every one of the last five sessions introduced at the 
very early part of the session. It has a simple premise, yet it is in 
the best interests of the search for better government, and I hope that 
we can as a body, together with the other body, see fit to imbed it 
into our body politic and into our legal system right at the start.
  It is simply this, Mr. Speaker. We now have a situation where the 
fiscal year of the Federal Government ends on September 30, and legally 
under Congress' own laws we are compelled to pass a new budget by the 
next day, October 1. We have never, or perhaps only one time, 
accomplished that during the time that I have been a Member of 
Congress, since 1983.
  Not only have we failed to do that, but on 53 occasions during my 
incumbency these last 14 years, on 53 occasions we have had to resort 
to temporary funding until a full budget could be put in place. Those 
temporary funding measures, called continuing resolutions, have become 
a way of life for the Congress of the United States, flaunting the very 
same law that the Congress itself put in to govern itself on budgetary 
matters and to bring a timetable end to the budgetary process every 
year, 53 times.
  Moreover, since I came to Congress not only do we have these 53 
occasions where we had to do temporary funding, but we had 8 Government 
shutdowns. That is the Government of the United States, the greatest 
power in the world that civilization has ever known, was shut down. We 
had no government in the United States during those periods of time.
  Well, my measure, the one that I am reintroducing today, calls for an 
automatic resumption of the last year's budget or the House-passed 
version or the Senate-passed version, most recent of those, whichever 
is lowest in numbers, to take effect automatically on the day after the 
budget deadline comes into being. This would forever prevent the 
Government shutdown.
  We added to it a feature this time around, in which you will see when 
you examine the bill and the Congressional Record reflecting it, that 
indeed the funding that will resume the next day after a budget 
deadline has been missed will be at 75 percent of the levels of the 
previous appropriation bill, previous budget, or the House or Senate 
passed version or even the President's proposal for the new budget.
  Why do we have that in? At the suggestion of Senator Stevens, of 
Alaska, the chief appropriator in the other body, we have adopted a 75-
percent level which would give additional incentive to Members of 
Congress not to rest on the laurels of having passed an automatic 
budget reflecting last year's numbers, but rather to give them 
incentive to proceed to finalize a budget with the priorities that they 
will be setting unencumbered, shall we say, by a full funding that 
would make them lax in the proposition that a new budget has to be 
adopted. So the 75-percent level is now a part of it.
  One example serves to show the absolute ludicrousness of continuing 
down the path of these continuing resolutions and the possibility and 
actualities of Government shutdowns. In 1990, in December 1990, while 
we had amassed our--half a million of our young fellow Americans in the 
deserts of the Middle East, poised to do battle with the Iraqi 
aggressors in Kuwait, while they were poised and armed to the teeth, 
their Government, the United States Government, shutdown. Now that is 
abhorrently embarrassing, embarrassing to say the least, but absolutely 
horrendous if we look at it in its historic perspective, to have our 
young people with their rifles in hand with no government for which to 
fight. That is abysmal and something that we must correct.
  So what are we going to do? We are going to try to mesh with the 
Senate's, the other body's action in this regard. I have the support of 
a strong handful of Members of the Senate who have introduced a package 
of their own following this line, and we hope that the Congress of the 
United States will at last adopt a measure that will end Government 
shutdowns forever.

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