[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 125 (Wednesday, October 6, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H8177-H8179]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
WAIVING POINTS OF ORDER AGAINST CONFERENCE REPORT ON H.R. 4850,
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2005
Mr. LINDER. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I
call up House Resolution 822 and ask for its immediate consideration.
The Clerk read the resolution, as follows:
H. Res. 822
Resolved, That upon adoption of this resolution it shall be
in order to consider the conference report to accompany the
bill (H.R. 4850) making appropriations for the government of
the District of Columbia and other activities chargeable in
whole or in part against the revenues of said District for
the fiscal year ending September 30, 2005, and for other
purposes. All points of order against the conference report
and against its consideration are waived. The conference
report shall be considered as read.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Isakson). The gentleman from Georgia
(Mr. Linder) is recognized for 1 hour.
Mr. LINDER. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the
customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings),
pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During
consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose
of debate only.
Mr. Speaker, this is a standard rule for consideration of an
appropriations conference report, and H. Res. 822 provides for the
consideration of the conference reports for H.R. 4850, the District of
Columbia Appropriations Act of 2005. The rule waives all points of
order against the conference report and against its consideration. It
also provides that the conference report shall be considered as read.
Mr. Speaker, the House Committee on Appropriation continues to work
hard to complete the work on the remaining appropriations bills in
order to fund the responsibilities of the Federal Government. It has
passed 12 of 13 regular appropriations bills and continues to work with
the House and Senate leadership and the Senate Appropriations Committee
to complete the appropriations process.
While the 108th Congress has passed a continuing resolution funding
the government through November 20, I am pleased that the gentleman
from New Jersey (Mr. Frelinghuysen) and the District of Columbia
Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations today presents the
House with another individual appropriations conference report to send
to the President.
Mr. Speaker, I believe that the details of a bill should principally
be discussed during a general debate on this legislation. However, I
did want to note that the fiscal year 2005 D.C. Appropriations bill
will provide funding for the new Bioterrorism and Forensics Lab and
will provide full funding for the school improvement program, including
$13 million for public school improvements, $13 million for charter
schools, and $14 million for opportunity scholarships to promote
academic achievement and school choice.
I support these efforts to assist the District of Columbia students
whose opportunities for success and growth are undermined simply
because they reside in one of the least effective school districts in
America.
[[Page H8178]]
Mr. Speaker, the Committee on Rules has reported a good rule for
consideration of this conference report, and I urge my colleagues to
support it so that we may proceed with the general debate and
consideration of this bipartisan legislation.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. HASTINGS of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I
may consume, and I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Linder) for
yielding me the customary time.
Mr. Speaker, this rule is typical of that for most conference
reports, and I will not oppose it.
Mr. Speaker, there is no perfect legislation and certainly not when
it comes to funding matters. The underlying conference report providing
appropriations for the District of Columbia in fiscal year 2005
includes a variety of provisions that are controversial and detrimental
to the District's residents and, frankly, the country as a whole.
I do not have to tell my colleagues about the uniqueness of the
District of Columbia as a Federal city. It is the only place in the
Nation where constitutionally Congress can exercise micromanagement at
the highest and lowest of levels.
Taking into consideration the fact that the District of Columbia has
no voting representation in Congress, we should be mindful of this
privileged duty and careful not to put our parochial agendas on the
table when considering this conference report.
As the gentleman from Georgia mentioned, the report approves the
expenditure of a total of $8.3 billion in local funds for the District
and directly appropriates $560 million for various District programs
and projects. It includes $25.6 million for a tuition assistance
program for college-bound students, $3 million for improvements to the
Anacostia waterfront area, $6 million for a new public school library
initiative, and $5 million to improve foster care in the District.
While there are many quality programs funded by the conference
report, such as the ones I just mentioned, the report also includes
legislative riders that are a smorgasbord of controversy. The report
prohibits the use of funds for abortions, registering same-sex couples,
and for the distribution of clean needles and syringes. None of these
prohibitions were sought by the District, and they represent nothing
more than the ideological impositions of the majority.
Furthermore, deep down inside the conference report is what the
majority has dubbed a three-pronged school choice program. This program
is heralded by school voucher advocates as a way to improve academic
performance while promoting school choice. The reality is, however, the
approach is a direct cut in Congress' funding commitment to the
District's public schools.
{time} 1100
That, Mr. Speaker, is an embarrassment to this institution.
Our education system will never improve if we continue to divert our
attention away from improving public schools, the schools that are free
of cost and guaranteed to every child in America. Our public schools
will never improve if we continue to underfund the No Child Left Behind
Act. If the majority wants to point fingers at who is to fault for
failures in our education system, then it ought to stop pointing
fingers at the District of Columbia and start pointing them at all of
our districts that have failing schools.
In less than 3 years after its passage, the No Child Left Behind Act
has been underfunded by President Bush and Congressional Republicans by
more than $27 billion. Let me repeat that. In less than 3 years after
its passage, the No Child Left Behind Act has been underfunded by
President Bush and Congressional Republicans by more than $27 billion.
If we want to have a real discussion about education, then let's have
one. But let us be honest with the American people about what we are
doing to the entire Nation's education system. Let us start telling the
American people the truth and stop using the District as a petri dish
of ideological shortcomings when considering the needs and lives of the
residents of the Nation's Capital.
It is high time that we as lawmakers in this great body stop playing
political chess games with our responsibility to this process. We
should allow the people of Washington, D.C., to govern themselves, and
they should have a voting privilege in the House of Representatives.
Funding for the education of the Nation's children and overall
healthy well-being of its citizens should be our primary focus and
goal. The D.C. appropriations bill is not the stage to act out our
experimental projects that will not necessarily prove beneficial in the
end.
We must be mindful of the District's citizens that we have been given
charge over. They are silenced in this process by the Constitution, and
we must be responsible in our actions on their behalf.
I urge my colleagues to consider this responsibility when voting on
the underlying conference report.
Mr. HASTINGS of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I am privileged to yield 7
minutes to my good friend, the gentlewoman from the District of
Columbia (Ms. Norton), the non-voting Delegate that should be voting
like all of us, especially on this subject, who on behalf of this
community has pursued outstanding legislation.
Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.
I thank the gentleman for his graciousness in respecting the
independence of the people of the District of Columbia, citizens of the
United States entitled to the same rights that all other Americans
have.
I appreciate that the Committee on Rules, its chairman, its ranking
member, Members who come forward today with this bill, have brought
forward a conference report and a rule that enables the District of
Columbia to get its own money out, and the money that is due it from
the Federal Government, on time.
I think that we should be apologizing to the American people that, at
a time when all but two of our appropriations are not out, as we get
ready to go home, we are having to spend time on the budget of a local
jurisdiction. It must be hard to make people back home understand what
we are doing, working on the taxpayer-raised budget of the District of
Columbia and its Federal funds, rather than on the large Federal
appropriations that await conference reports and the President's
signature.
At the same time, I am grateful for the timeliness of this conference
report. Of the 13 appropriations bills, only two, Defense and D.C.,
will be signed by the President when we leave to go home at the end of
this week. In a real sense, this turns on its head the practice in
recent years and, certainly, since the Republican majority has been in
control.
D.C., irrelevant, literally irrelevant, to Members of the House and
Senate, because almost all of the money is raised by our own local
residents and taxpayers, D.C., the smallest, has traditionally been the
most troublesome of the appropriations; the last out, the appropriation
that caused more Members to come to the floor with amendments.
Amendments that had to do with the District of Columbia? Absolutely
not. Amendments that were of special interest to that Member but of no
relevance to the District of Columbia.
The opposite has been the case this year, and it is because of the
leadership of the appropriators and of the authorizers. There are no
new riders. Three were threatened, but the appropriators and the
authorizers worked together so that those riders did not come forward
to be voted on on this floor. It is not that these Members are
omnipotent, it is that, when leaders exercise leadership and discourage
extraneous material, particularly on the appropriation of a local
jurisdiction, an independent jurisdiction, their leadership can and
this year has proved to be critical.
At the same time, I must take strong exception to the riders that
remain; not new riders, but riders that remain. They are particularly
inexcusable.
First, the needle-exchange rider, which makes D.C. alone in the
United States of America. Hundreds of jurisdictions use their own money
to pay for the exchange of dirty needles for clean needles, in
accordance with all of the scientific evidence, and, I may say, all of
the great scientific organizations, official and private, that say you
save lives when you do not allow dirty needles to be passed around so
that you spread HIV-AIDS.
[[Page H8179]]
So I should thank the Congress of the United States in the name of
the people of the District of Columbia that, because of the needle-
exchange admonition and bar in our appropriation, we have the highest
HIV-AIDS rate in the country.
The interference with needle exchange, of course, is very different
from other interference, because it costs lives. It is why we have so
many men, women and children who otherwise would not be anywhere close
to the AIDS epidemic with AIDS today. That calamity is laid at the feet
of this Congress and essentially at the feet of this House, because the
Senate asked that the District be able to spend its own local money for
needle exchange. It was the House that refused to let the conference
report come forward if, in fact, that was included.
There are, of course, other old riders in this bill. The old rider
that says all the rest of you in the United States of America can spend
your money for abortions for poor women, but not the residents of the
District of Columbia. They are American citizens, but we are not about
to treat them as first-class citizens. Remember, they are second-class
citizens. So they can't spend their own money for abortions for their
own poor women.
Perhaps as a matter of ordinary democracy, the most shameful rider
says that the District can't spend its own money to lobby for its own
rights. This House, not the Senate, the Senate has said, we are not on
that boat, let them spend their own money if they want to spend their
own money to get full and equal rights in the House and in the Senate,
and we think that is their right and prerogative as Americans, but the
House said, ``Oh, no, that is not for the District. In my district, we
better be able to spend our own money to lobby for anything we want to.
Not in the Nation's Capital.''
This is a time of war, this is a time of great and urgent matters in
our country. This is not the time when we ought to be considering this
appropriation at all. At the same time, I am grateful that, if it had
to be here, that before we went home this appropriation was out of
Congress; that I am not here in November, that I am not here in
December, trying to get my own money out of this Congress.
In past years, the House has been critical of the management of the
District of Columbia without conceding that not allowing the District
to spend its own money on time has wrapped the District in knots as it
tries to balance on last year's budget while waiting for the Congress
to release its own money.
The appropriators, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Frelinghuysen),
the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fattah), our authorizer, the
gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Tom Davis), have gone very far in helping
us to meet this burden. I appreciate that the Committee on Rules has
taken taking us to the next step and making us one of two
appropriations to clear the Congress before we clear out of here.
Mr. HASTINGS of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for
time, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. LINDER. Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, I yield
back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the
resolution.
The previous question was ordered.
The resolution was agreed to.
A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.
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