[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 80 (Tuesday, June 10, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H3639-H3640]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  BAD MANAGEMENT OF AN EMERGENCY BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Olver] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OLVER. Mr. Speaker, today the President, President Clinton, 
vetoed a bill which he had said very clearly that he was going to veto. 
Very clearly he had indicated that that veto was coming because of a 
series of extraneous riders to an otherwise emergency bill. And so we 
have a situation that I have really in 30 years of legislative life 
that I have gone through both in Massachusetts, my home State, and here 
6 years in the Congress, I think that I have never seen an emergency 
bill managed more cavalierly, more carelessly by the legislative body 
and the majority than this one has been managed this year.
  It was back in March, the 19th of March, that the President had asked 
for this legislation totaling about $7.1 billion, part of it to deal 
with the very serious natural disasters in the Ohio Valley, the 
flooding in northern California, the Red River Valley, and the Dakotas, 
and in Minnesota in order to help put back the lives of hundreds of 
thousands of devastated families, farms and businesses, people whose 
lives had really been deeply hurt by that and also, by the way, to 
carry out $1.8 billion that was to provide our peacekeepers in Bosnia, 
those people, men and women, who wear the American uniform and are 
doing a dirty and a tough job, but a necessary job, the resources that 
they need in order to do that.

                              {time}  2015

  There is no reason whatsoever why this bill should not have been 
passed

[[Page H3640]]

and signed by the President, a clean emergency bill to deal with these 
natural disasters and with our peacekeepers' needs in Bosnia, no reason 
at all why that should not have been passed by the Congress and signed 
into law by the time we went home for our Memorial Day long weekend, 
and the 10 days that we, as Members of Congress, spent in our 
districts.
  However, on May 23, we recessed. There was an attempt by the majority 
to adjourn, but instead, that was denied by a relatively wise majority 
that day, a majority of the Members, and we instead recessed for those 
10 days, leaving those hundreds of thousands of families without having 
been dealt with fairly for the disasters that they had undergone.
  Then it took us the whole next week after we came back until June 5, 
late last week, when we finally passed the emergency legislation, and 
even then, the majority did not send it to the President. Even then, 
they held it over the weekend until the beginning of this week, when 
they knew that they had added provisions to the legislation that the 
President had said very clearly change the balances of powers that were 
extraneous to any emergencies that would force a veto, and so early 
this week he vetoed the legislation.
  Why did the Republican majority follow this kind of strange procedure 
in this legislation? Well, they had a major environmental rider in the 
legislation which was to the conversion of certain claimed rights-of-
way, conversion of rights-of-way to paved highways across National 
Parks and Public Lands and military installations. That legislation, 
that rider by itself, could never have passed this Congress, could 
never have passed either branch of the Congress, yet it was put into 
this bill and it was not even an emergency.
  Then they had a census rider in there that the President said that he 
would have to veto which would have removed the procedure for sampling 
that has been used in each of the last two censuses under a Democratic 
President, under a Republican President, that procedure for sampling of 
our population that gives us the most accurate possible census at the 
lowest possible cost.
  Now, why was that? Well, it turns out that there seemed to be some 
belief that it was an advantage, it would be an advantage to the 
Democratic Party. Well, that is not really the case. It is not at all 
clear who would be advantaged. The only thing happening here was that 
by adding that rider, we end up with a higher cost census, a less 
accurate census, and one that is very difficult to get done at all. So 
that rider was put on.
  Then the third and probably the most critical item among the riders 
was that to impose a distinct power shift in the constitutional powers 
in dealing with budgets between the Congress and the presidency. For 
those reasons it was vetoed, and for those reasons the clean bill 
should be passed by this Congress and sent back to the President so he 
can sign it.

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