[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 136 (Wednesday, November 24, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H10890-H10893]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          FURTHER CONTINUING APPROPRIATIONS, FISCAL YEAR 2005

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on 
Appropriations be discharged from further consideration of the joint 
resolution (H.J. Res. 115) making further continuing appropriations for 
the fiscal year 2005, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate 
consideration.
  The Clerk read the title of the joint resolution.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Virginia?
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I think before 
we move forward on this, it is necessary to clarify a few things and 
ask a few questions.
  We are here because a provision was included in the omnibus 
appropriation bill that allows the chairmen of the Committee on 
Appropriations or their agents access to IRS facilities and tax return 
information that may be housed within those facilities without 
apparently adequate protection for the privacy of taxpayers. Most 
Members did not know this language had been included. So far as I know, 
I have yet to meet a single Member who knew it. Certainly I did not 
know the language had been included.
  This is a serious problem, and it raises the question, why did it 
happen. It seems to me there are three reasons for that.
  First, there was obviously not enough time to review the bill. This 
bill spends over $380 billion of taxpayer money. It is over 3,000 pages 
long. The IRS provision is six lines in the middle of it all. It was 
not filed until 1 a.m. on Saturday morning. Unless they have come down 
today, there is still no official GPO print of the document. It was not 
available in useful electronic form until Tuesday.
  Despite the fact that this issue was briefly discussed on the House 
floor in a relatively obscure way during the colloquy between the 
gentleman from Florida (Chairman Young) and the gentleman from 
California (Chairman Thomas), it was only thanks to the review of the 
legislative language by Senator Conrad's staff that we discovered the 
problem. That alone suggests Members should have had more time to 
review the bill.
  Second, the pressure from the majority party leadership to complete 
action and adjourn was overriding. To meet the timetable of that 
leadership, staff worked all night for several days in a row in an 
effort to finalize the omnibus bill as quickly as possible; and as a 
result, corners were cut.
  Third, this provision is not the only problem with the omnibus. There 
are important policy issues that were placed in this bill that were 
never voted on in either Chamber. Some of them are reasonable and some 
of them most certainly are not.
  There are also a number of other important provisions that were 
dropped at the insistence of the Republican leadership, even though 
they had been supported by majorities in both Houses. In neither case 
were Members of the House given sufficient time to become aware of them 
or to fully understand their significance.
  I include the following examples for the Record.

       Some examples of problematic provisions added include:
       Limits on judicial review of timber sales in Alaska;
       Removal of the wilderness designation for areas of Georgia;
       Extension of grazing permits without legally required 
     environmental reviews;
       Allowing use of wilderness in ways that are banned under 
     current law [other examples to follow].
       Some examples of items that were dropped include:
       Language related to contracting out;
       The bipartisan Chabot/Andrews amendment would have 
     prohibited road building in the Tongas National Forest in 
     Alaska to support non-economically viable timber sales;
       The provisions that would ease the economic embargo and 
     travel restrictions on Cuba;
       The Sanders cash-balance pension plan amendment that would 
     have protected American workers who are covered under 
     traditional pension plans from unfair conversions to cash-
     balance plans; and,
       The MILC reauthorization.

  Mr. Speaker, in addition to these examples, I think it is important 
to understand that there were still other problems with this 
legislation. The full policy impact of funding cuts, for instance, were 
obscured by the manner in which the across-the-board cut effectively 
hid the real funding levels for a number of key programs.
  For all of those reasons, that is why I said during floor debate the 
following: ``As the press finds out more and more about what the impact 
is on various programs, I think the Congress is going to wish that we 
spent considerably more time dealing with this in a rational manner.''
  Now, some of those problems could be avoided if the House adhered to 
rules that are meant to give Members time to review legislation before 
they vote on it. But the majority leadership has almost routinely set 
aside those safeguards. I agree with Senator Conrad's statement 
yesterday, echoed by comments yesterday and today by the gentlewoman 
from California (Ms. Pelosi), that that must change.
  But in the final analysis, an even more important reason for this 
fiasco is the way the House majority party leadership has 
systematically sought to minimize accountability for their decisions by 
hiding those decisions until after the election. From day one the 
majority party leadership ran this House in a way that guaranteed that 
appropriation decisions would be hidden from the public until after the 
election.
  Congressional Quarterly wrote this 2 days ago: ``Appropriation bills 
are the only measures that are traditionally open to free-wheeling 
amendments in both Chambers. But in the Senate this

[[Page H10891]]

year, seven of the 13 measures were never put to a minute of floor 
debate.''
  Continuing to quote CQ: ``That may have limited the right of Senators 
to try to change the legislation, but it was of great benefit to the 
majority leader, who did not have to tie up the Chamber for most of 
June and July allowing Senators to offer amendments, and it was further 
evidence that the GOP leadership had every intention all year long of 
compressing most appropriations into one bill.'' So says CQ.
  Now, why did they do that? Because the Republican leadership knew 
that they could not sell the appropriations bills to moderates in their 
own caucus in the other body before the election.
  Congressional Quarterly pointed out: ``In the omnibus Senate VA 
appropriations subcommittee, Chairman Bond had to slash $3 billion from 
the VA-HUD bill that advanced unanimously earlier through the 
Appropriations Committee in September. Senator Specter likewise had to 
use budgetary legerdemain to make his bill more politically attractive 
until it was rolled into the omnibus and pared back. `The amount we 
have been given was not adequate,' Bond said.''
  Mr. Speaker, to avoid these controversies, these bills were packaged 
together. The main reason for this problem is political, not 
procedural. Staffers are being blamed; but as a practical matter, 
staffers were forced to produce legislation under impossible 
circumstances. The majority staff presented language that had not been 
properly vetted. The minority staff did not catch the fact that the 
majority had inadvertently dropped language that would have protected 
the privacy of American taxpayers.
  As a result, the Congress has egg on its face, the majority is 
disgraced, the Committee on Appropriations' ability to conduct 
oversight still has not been addressed because legislative language 
will be dropped rather than fixed, nobody wins, and the Nation has less 
confidence in the competence and honesty of its institutions.
  One measure of how badly this institution is suffering is the level 
of distrust and suspicion that now permeates both Chambers. It has 
become hard for some to believe what I want to believe, that this was 
an unintended mistake that resulted from lack of time for Members to 
meet their responsibilities and lack of sleep on the part of the staff 
that had been pushed to the point of exhaustion.
  I have been told, for instance, that two members of the 
appropriations staff actually fainted during a readout of the energy 
and water bill because they had been up for more than 2 days in a row 
without sleep. That would not have happened if the House and Senate had 
passed its bills under the regular order and conferenced them one by 
one with no ``doomsday'' deadline.
  It is one thing for Congress to wind up putting numerous 
appropriation bills into a broad-based omnibus bill because legitimate 
controversies have delayed the compromises necessary to pass those 
bills. It is quite another thing to produce this kind of end-of-session 
chaos by design.
  This should be a wake-up call to the majority party leadership to 
change practices and procedures to prevent this type of credibility and 
accountability problem in the future. Most of all, it is a wake-up call 
to reestablish trust, by recognizing that adherence to normal rules and 
respect for the rights of the minority do not just protect the 
minority, but the majority as well.

                              {time}  1415

  If Dick Bolling, the legendary former chairman of the Committee on 
Rules, were around today, he would say, ``Let's stop the bitching and 
get about the fixing.'' That is exactly what we ought to do. But the 
problem is that in the old days, we actually used to have conferences. 
Every member of every subcommittee used to meet with members of the 
other body in conference and they would thrash out the differences. As 
a result, Members took pride in the fact that they all knew what was in 
the bill, even if the other body largely relied on staff. Today that 
difference is gone. Today it is apparent that even people who are in 
charge of producing the bill are not fully aware of what is in it 
because of the rush and because of the lack of an orderly procedure.
  We need to go back to the time when we were having real conferences 
with the other body so that we could legislate rather than simply 
impose policy decisions that are predetermined ahead of time in the 
majority leadership's office.
  Mr. Speaker, further reserving the right to object, I yield to the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui).
  Mr. MATSUI. Mr. Speaker, we actually had quite a week last week. The
9/11 conference came back with a bipartisan solution with the two 
Senators and obviously the two House Members, both Democrats and 
Republicans agreeing; and it was not brought to the floor because even 
though the President and Vice President supported the legislation, at 
the same time the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he was against it. We do 
not know why it did not come up, but hopefully we get some action on 
this.
  Secondly, the Republican conference had a meeting, and they reversed 
11 years of a rule that now will allow an indicted felon who is in the 
leadership to continue on in the leadership and not have to step aside 
until the matter is resolved.
  Lastly, obviously, by having a bill come up, $388 billion, over 3,000 
pages, and having language that basically will allow any staffer that 
is assigned by the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations to look 
at anyone's tax return. Let me tell Members what this really is all 
about. Talking about a tax return, if in fact that law went into place, 
and in spite of the little colloquy the gentleman from Florida (Mr. 
Young) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) had, that was 
irrelevant because the language of the law speaks for itself. This 
would have been in the law if not for the fact that Mr. Conrad caught 
it.
  That would allow a staffer to go to the IRS in an open meeting and 
ask for a specific return from any individual in this room or anywhere 
else and open up that return, display it, give it to the national 
newspapers, do whatever that person wanted with it and not suffer any 
consequences.
  The reason we actually had to tighten the law was because in the 
1970s when Watergate occurred, when we had the enemies list, when we 
had the plumbers and all of those things going on, the wiretaps, people 
were allowed to go to the Internal Revenue Service and ask for returns 
of individual members. It was not until the mid-1970s when we tightened 
it up.
  Perhaps members of the Committee on Ways and Means, or their 
designees, particularly the chairman of the committee, can in fact 
obtain tax returns of companies, corporations, and obviously 
individuals. But before that happens, one has to have an executive 
session so it has to be properly noticed. Executive session, as my 
colleagues know, is a closed session. If any of the information in 
those documents should be released to the press or to the public or to 
anyone else, it is a felony offense with up to 5 years in prison, 
$5,000 fine, and other sanctions. That was as a direct result of 
Watergate.
  Here now in the dark of night without any notice a provision was 
slipped into this bill, a $388 billion bill, to basically allow 
staffers to look at anyone's return without any criminal sanctions.
  I have to say, I know there is a discussion about what happened, why 
it happened and what was the purpose of it; but what is really 
troubling to me, I do not believe an IRS agent or one of the IRS 
employees wrote this provision. Had they been asked to write the 
provision, they would have based it upon how the Committee on Ways and 
Means would obtain that information. They would not have written it so 
broadly. One of the most important things an IRS employee will tell you 
is they protect tax returns of individuals, companies, and nonprofit 
corporations. So there was more to this.
  I have to say in conclusion here, the real problem I see is the fact 
that as long as we are not given notice, as the gentleman from 
Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) says, as long as there is not a give and take, 
this problem is going to come up more and more. We ought to be happy 
that the other body saved us from a massive embarrassment, because the 
reality is had this become law, there would have been some time over 
the next few years when someone would have abused that process and 
someone's returns would have been disclosed to the press.
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

[[Page H10892]]

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia). Is there 
objection to the request of the gentleman from Virginia?
  Mr. HOYER. Reserving the right to object, Mr. Speaker, I want to say 
that this was not unanticipated. I rose during the consideration of the 
rule on Saturday and said, ``But the fear of the American people,'' 
referring to the bill that was to be considered pursuant to the rule 
that was then under consideration, ``is in the dead of the night, in 
the cloudiness of quick consideration that many things are included in 
these bills which perhaps both Houses would not have put in there, as 
has happened too frequently during the course of this Congress, or that 
either House really knows is in there.''
  I said that on Saturday.
  Later that day it was discovered on the floor of the Senate 
legislation which had been discussed in this House but the 
ramifications of which, the meaning of which, the effect of which was 
really not known. That is of great concern. The chairman of the 
Committee on Finance in the Senate said it was ``an outrage.'' John 
McCain said ``the process is broken.''
  Mr. Speaker, nine of 13 appropriation bills were included in the 
pages of the legislation that is before me here on the desk. Now, this 
is approximately 1,500, 1,600 pages. The bill is actually between 3,300 
and 3,400 because the bill has fewer words per page on it. Seventy-five 
percent of the bill which we considered, which included the language 
which has brought us here today, 75 percent of that bill had never been 
on the floor of the United States Senate, never considered, never 
debated, never open to the public's review. Seventy-five percent of the 
bill that was brought to this floor.
  Mr. Speaker, the issue here today is not the granting of unanimous 
consent to ensure that the government keeps running until the 8th of 
December. We are all going to be for that. That is the appropriate 
thing for us to do. Nor is, in my opinion, the staff work. We have an 
extraordinarily excellent staff on the Committee on Appropriations, led 
by an extraordinary leader of judgment, of wise counsel, and great 
integrity who was forced, along with staff, to work in an incredibly 
telescoped fashion.
  So 75 percent of the bills were never considered on the Senate floor, 
one of the bills never on the House or Senate floor, and one never even 
reported out of the Senate subcommittee. In addition to that, and some 
may not know this even at this point in time, there were three major 
authorization bills included in this bill that have never been debated 
on the floor in terms of their effect: the Satellite Home Extension 
Reauthorization Act, the Snake River Water Rights Act, and the Federal 
Lands Recreation Enhancement Act.
  My presumption is, and I have not talked to each one of the ranking 
members of each committee, the Resources Committee in two of the cases, 
Committee on Energy and Commerce in the third, my presumption is that 
they agreed and therefore did not object to their inclusion.
  In addition to that, we deleted provisions that were approved in the 
House, approved in the Senate, one affecting millions of Americans on 
minimum wage. This House directed the conference to keep it in by a 
significant majority vote. The Senate adopted it. It was dropped 
without really any ability to discuss it, as my ranking member on the 
Committee on Appropriations said, in conference.
  I have been on the Committee on Appropriations not as long as the 
gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey), but a significant number of years, 
23 to be specific, and was used to going to conference, to sitting at 
the table representing the 662,000 people I represent and saying I 
believe that we ought to do A or B. There was no opportunity given by 
this procedure to do that.
  Now the sad fact is that this is not an abberation. As the gentleman 
from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) pointed out, this is the way we do 
appropriation bills now. Last year we did not adopt the majority of the 
appropriation bills until the following calendar year; the year before 
that until the following calendar year, once in January and once in 
February. My goodness, it is November 24 today. We are doing it early, 
one could say.
  But the fact of the matter is this has become the practice of this 
House, the practice of this House not to have conferences, not only on 
appropriation bills, but not to have conferences on Ways and Means and 
tax bills that affect millions and millions of Americans, not to have 
conferences even when we refer bills from the floor back to a 
conference. And we have found last year a bill being reported back that 
had never gone to that conference notwithstanding the vote of this 
House to send it to conference, and no conferee had an opportunity to 
say anything about the bill.
  Mr. Speaker, the lamentable fact is we are here because of a process 
that is undermining this democratic institution. We are here because we 
are not taking the time to include all interested parties, including 
the American people, in the consideration of this legislation. We have 
closed rules, closed conferences or no conferences, conferences called 
without Democrats being included, dropping items approved by both 
Houses, and adding measures not approved by either House. This is 
unfortunate.
  Mr. Speaker, as I said, we are not going to object to this unanimous 
consent. It is the appropriate request to make. The good news for the 
American people is, as the gentleman from California (Mr. Matsui) has 
observed, it will give us an opportunity to do something that has been 
vetted, that has been considered, has been considered in the open with 
due hearings, on television, in a bipartisan fashion, reported out, and 
I refer of course to the 9/11 Commission report.
  This report seeks to prevent another tragic attack on the United 
States of America and the loss of 3,000 souls within hours, within 
minutes. This report was unanimously adopted. This report was passed 
overwhelmingly by the other body with less than four people opposing 
it, and it came to a conference, essentially, a meeting: the gentleman 
from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez) on our side, a number on the other side 
of the aisle. The Senate came together. Senator Lieberman and Senator 
Collins came together and agreed and were overwhelmingly supported by 
their Senate colleagues. They said we have a bipartisan agreement to 
make America safer.

                              {time}  1430

  Governor Kean and our distinguished former colleague, Lee Hamilton, 
said we must act now. They said that in July.
  Mr. Speaker, we have not acted. But as a result of what we do today, 
we will come back to this House on the 6th or 7th of December with an 
obligation to act on the omnibus appropriation bill, but it will give 
us an opportunity to do the right thing and pass the 9/11 Commission 
report which is overwhelmingly supported.
  I will tell my friends in this body, I was somewhat dismayed at the 
Speaker's spokesman when he said that what good was it to pass a bill 
that the majority of the conference did not support. I will tell my 
friends in this House, without fear of contradiction, not one, and I 
invite anybody to come to the floor to contradict me, if the 9/11 
Commission report is put on this floor as reported out of the Senate 
and as agreed to in the conference committee on this bill, it will be 
passed overwhelmingly in this House.
  And I will say to my friend, the spokesman for the Speaker, the good 
is that the American people will be well served, whether or not a 
majority of your conference agrees. That is the good. That is why we 
are here. That ought to be our focus. And because of this happenstance, 
this mistake, this rightfully-to-be-reconsidered provision that was put 
in the bill without due consideration, or, if given due consideration, 
inartfully drawn by someone not in this body, then we will be 
advantaged because we will have an opportunity to respond to the 
American public's concern and the unanimous recommendations of the 9/11 
Commission and to the support of the President of the United States who 
asked this to pass.
  Now, Mr. Rumsfeld, our Secretary of Defense, says he is supportive of 
the President's view that it ought to pass. Now, if we have the 
President, we have the Secretary of Defense, we have the overwhelming 
majority, I do not know of anybody on our side of the aisle who

[[Page H10893]]

is going to oppose it. Maybe there are some. And I am sure that there 
are certainly sufficient Members on your side of the aisle to ensure 
218 votes to pass such a unanimously and supported recommendation to 
make America safer.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from Wisconsin under my 
reservation.
  Mr. OBEY. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I will be very brief. I 
would just like to make one point. A fair amount has been written about 
how the responsibility for this mistake lies with congressional staff. 
I want to simply make the point that the staff was ordered to produce 
an appropriation bill by a certain deadline. And so they performed in 
an astoundingly enervating way in trying to meet the deadlines that 
they were ordered to meet and they worked to the point of exhaustion. 
And when people do that, there are going to be mistakes made.
  The reason we have rules is because it enables not just the minority 
but the majority as well to catch mistakes and correct them before they 
embarrass the institution and do damage to our system. The way to avoid 
mistakes like this is to prevent hundreds of pages of appropriations 
from coming to the floor without ever having been considered in both 
bodies. The way to avoid problems like this in the future is to see to 
it that the necessary political compromises are made at the beginning 
of the process in the budget resolution so that you do not have such an 
unrealistic set of marching orders to the Appropriations Committee that 
the leadership is forced to conclude that they cannot get the votes 
from their own troops in the other body until after they are safely 
past the election.
  So a little less rigidity, a little less ideological zeal, a little 
more willingness to compromise, and a little more recognition that 
every Member of this body has a right to do his or her job and they can 
best do it when they are given the time to do it. That will mean that 
in the end we remake this body into what it is supposed to be, which is 
435 people who are legitimate representatives of their constituents, 
rather than rubber stamps for whatever the leadership front office 
wants them to vote for on a particular day.
  Mr. HOYER. Reclaiming my time under my reservation, I thank the 
gentleman for his comments and would join him in reiterating the fact 
that the fault lies not in the staff. The fault lies not in the 
objective in this particular provision that was trying to be attained. 
It was that a significant, very harmful mistake was made. Whoever made 
it made it, as the gentleman from Wisconsin has pointed out, in the 
press of a process which did not give time for reflection, so that, 
having been caught at a time when we did not then have time to correct 
it because the rush to judgment was in place, we now have taken that 
time, and I think that is a good thing. I appreciate the staffs helping 
us get to that point on both sides of the aisle.
  I want to say, secondly, that our Founding Fathers set up a process, 
Mr. Speaker, that was not as efficient as authoritarian regimes claim 
to be. If you have the votes and you can jam something through, so be 
it; but our Founding Fathers, Mr. Speaker, wanted a reflective process, 
a process where there was full and fair consideration in both Houses, 
because their concern was that democracy would work if everybody had 
the opportunity to see it and to participate in it.
  This process of thousands of pages of bills being passed within hours 
under a martial-law rule did not allow that process to occur, and the 
result was inevitable, that things would be passed unknown to this 
body, unknown to the American public and of great concern to them which 
would not have enjoyed a majority of support in this House or the 
Senate if they had been fully aired.
  Hopefully, this will be an object lesson which will lead us to a 
process more open, more open to minority views, with time given to 
staff and Members to digest, to reflect, and to make wise judgments.
  Mr. YOUNG of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I regret that some have 
misinterpreted section 222 in the omnibus bill. The administration had 
requested an unprecedented increase to hire additional staff for the 
IRS's processing and enforcement activities. Because of this more than 
$500 million increase in funds, the subcommittee felt it necessary to 
conduct proper oversight. The provision was simply an attempt to 
exercise our constitutional stewardship of the IRS's budget request, 
with no intention to review or investigate individual tax returns. This 
intent was clearly communicated in a colloquy with the chairman of Ways 
and Means Committee during Saturday's floor debate.
  In order to allow oversight of these funds without infringing upon 
individual's privacy, the subcommittee requested that IRS draft the 
language. Two days prior to the bill being considered by the House, 17 
staff members from the House and the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, 
read through every word of the subcommittee's bill and report. Clearly, 
there was never any desire to access personal information and it's 
unfortunate that some have misrepresented and exaggerated the purpose 
of this language. Nevertheless, I support the removal of the provision 
to end the confusion surrounding the issue.
  Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Tom Davis of Virginia). Is there 
objection to the request of the gentleman from Virginia?
  There was no objection.
  The Clerk read the joint resolution, as follows:

                             H.J. Res. 115

       Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
     United States of America in Congress assembled, That Public 
     Law 108-309 is further amended by striking the date specified 
     in section 107(c) and inserting the following: ``December 8, 
     2004''.

  The joint resolution was ordered to be engrossed and read a third 
time, was read the third time, and passed, and a motion to reconsider 
was laid on the table.

                          ____________________