[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 183 (Tuesday, December 8, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H13556-H13558]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




MOTION TO INSTRUCT CONFEREES ON H.R. 3288, TRANSPORTATION, HOUSING AND 
    URBAN DEVELOPMENT, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2010

  Mr. OLVER. Madam Speaker, pursuant to clause 1 of rule XXII and by 
direction of the Committee on Appropriations, I move to take from the 
Speaker's table the bill (H.R. 3288) making appropriations for the 
Departments of Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and 
related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, and for 
other purposes, with a Senate amendment thereto, disagree to the Senate 
amendment, and agree to the conference asked by the Senate.
  The Clerk read the title of the bill.
  The motion was agreed to.
  Mr. LATHAM. Madam Speaker, I have a motion at the desk.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Clerk will report the motion.
  The Clerk read as follows:

       Mr. Latham moves that the managers on the part of the House 
     at the conference on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses 
     on the Senate amendment to the bill H.R. 3288 be instructed 
     as follows:
       (1) To disagree to any proposition in violation of clause 9 
     of Rule XXII which:
       (a) Includes matter not committed to the conference 
     committee by either House;
       (b) Modifies specific matter committed to conference by 
     either or both Houses beyond the scope of the specific matter 
     as committed to the conference committee.
       (2) That they shall not record their approval of the final 
     conference agreement (as such term is used in clause 12(a)(4) 
     of rule XXII of the Rules of the House of Representatives) 
     unless the text of such agreement has been available to the 
     managers in an electronic, searchable, and downloadable form 
     for at least 72 hours prior to the time described in such 
     clause.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 7 of rule XXII, the 
gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Latham) and the gentleman from Massachusetts 
(Mr. Olver) each will control 30 minutes.
  The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa.
  Mr. LATHAM. I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Madam Speaker, this is a very basic motion to instruct on what could 
be a very complicated bill. This motion simply instructs the conferees 
to restrain from adding any extraneous materials--like other 
appropriation bills and any other issues outside the provisions 
included in either the House- or Senate-passed Transportation HUD bill, 
or THUD bill. This motion also provides any conference report will be 
available for no less than 72 hours before the conference report will 
be brought up for final passage in the House.
  Madam Speaker, the THUD bill, like every appropriations bill this 
year, was slammed through the House in July under an unprecedented 
closed and restrictive rule, all in the name of completing these bills 
in ``regular order.''
  The Senate, even with all of its scheduling issues, managed to pass a 
regular THUD bill in an open process with amendments--and I might add 
by September 17.
  This THUD bill should have been considered and passed by early 
October at the latest. Instead, here we are now in December.
  According to the plan as presented to me, Chairman Obey is planning 
on lumping five other bills with the THUD bill to create an omnibus. 
Three of those bills--Financial Services, Foreign Operations, and the 
Labor H bills--weren't even considered on the Senate floor. Two of the 
other bills--the Military Construction-VA and the Commerce, Justice, 
Science bills--have passed both the House and the Senate, and there is 
no reason these bills shouldn't have their own free-standing 
conferences. In fact, the Commerce, Justice, Science bill was supposed 
to go to conference on November 17, but that conference got yanked due 
to some cold feet on the part of the majority at the prospect of having 
their Members have to vote on Guantanamo Bay policy.
  By voting for this motion to instruct, you are voting for regular 
order process on these bills. We should be able to vote on veterans 
issues separate from the D.C. issues, the foreign aid issues, and all 
of the other issues we don't want stacked together. There are other 
things like railroad issues, immigration issues. They should all be 
done separately.
  Further, this motion to instruct provides that the House will make 
available the full text of the conference report to the conferees at 
least 72 hours prior to consideration. There are billions of dollars at 
stake and a lot of policy to digest. It's our responsibility that we, 
as elected Representatives representing our districts, know what we're 
voting on. Further, I believe this motion is not inconsistent with 
Speaker Pelosi's policy.
  I urge a ``yes'' vote on the simple motion to instruct.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. OLVER. Madam Speaker, the motion that we have before us is 
essentially the same motion that we had earlier back in September, 
September 23, when the Legislative branch appropriations bill was 
brought to the floor and we were considering doing a continuing 
resolution for a period of time, which ended up leading to a second 
continuing resolution at the point that the first one had run out.
  The only difference from that motion is that this one now calls for 
72 hours rather than 48 hours, thereby making the time constraint a 
more difficult one given the circumstances that we are in and given the 
time at which we are supposed to have another continuing resolution run 
out.

                              {time}  1030

  So that's a very small point, because at 48 hours, it would be easier 
to deal with. Madam Speaker, in a perfect world, we would have 72 hours 
to further review this bill. However, we cannot guarantee that for the 
reason that the current CR expires on the 18th and the bills that have 
been mentioned by the gentleman from Iowa fund critical programs.
  The Departments that are funded in these bills cannot wait much 
longer for the funds, and we want to get the bills enacted for the 
entire year. It's already December 8. And we need to get these bills 
done. Plus, we all know that we need to have plenty of time for our 
colleagues on the Senate side to act.
  Now, Madam Speaker, I would just like to point out that in recent 
years, in 2005--and all of these, of course, were while the present 
minority was in the majority, and so they were in control of the 
procedures that were being followed--in 2005, the omnibus at that time 
included Agriculture, Commerce, Energy-Water, Foreign Operations, 
Interior, Labor-HHS-Education, the Leg Branch, Transportation, 
Treasury, VA-HUD and Foreign Operations and that year happened to be 
the vehicle being used to bring that process to a conclusion.
  So the number of bills that were involved in that process were nine 
plus

[[Page H13557]]

the vehicle, 10 of the 12 bills. In that instance, the Agriculture bill 
had never been considered in the Senate; the Commerce, Justice and 
State bills had never been considered in the Senate. In fact, that was 
before--that was Justice and Judiciary at that point, it was a more 
complicated bill. Energy-Water never were considered in the Senate, 
Interior had never been considered in the Senate, Labor-HHS had never 
been considered in the Senate, Leg Branch had never appointed 
conferees, Transportation and Treasury had never been considered in the 
Senate, and the VA-HUD bill was never considered in either body.
  Yet all of those bills were in that continuing resolution. And so 
this has been done in the past. That was the omnibus bill that finished 
up our work for the fiscal year 2005 budget.
  Going back a year, we considered an appropriations bill to finish up 
the fiscal year 2004 sequence that included Agriculture, Commerce, 
State, Justice, District of Columbia, Foreign Operations, Labor-Health-
Education, Transportation, Treasury and VA-HUD; and Agriculture was the 
vehicle. And CJS was never considered in the Senate. D.C. had not 
appointed conferees. The Foreign Operations bill had appointed 
conferees, but never reported a conference report. A report had never 
been agreed to. Labor-HHS, the conferees had been appointed, but then 
the conference, the conferees discharged from their appointment and 
brought it back to the full committee. And so VA-HUD never had 
appointed conferees. And so it goes.
  The conferees in these instances included a series of Members from 
the majority side, from the variety of the committees in each case. At 
that time, Mr. Young of Florida was the chairman of the Appropriations 
Committee. And I could go on here. In 2003, the consolidated 
appropriations resolution that completed the 2003 budgetary events 
included Agriculture, Commerce, District of Columbia, those were still 
part of it, except it was still a separate subcommittee, Energy-Water 
Development, Foreign Operations, Interior, Labor-HHS, Legislative 
Branch, Transportation, Treasury and Postal Service were now getting 
back at least two different reorganizations of the jurisdictions of the 
Appropriations Committee, all during the period that the present 
minority making the motion was in control and moved very quickly on the 
actions.
  In that year, 2003, every one of the bills that I have mentioned had 
never been considered in one or the other branch. Several of them had 
not been considered in the House, and several of them had not been 
considered in the Senate. Well, I'm wrong actually. In the House, Leg 
Branch had never appointed conferees, but it had been considered and 
the bill had been passed. But in the others, the others had never been 
considered in either House, in one of the two branches at least.
  So it is a time-honored process. When one gets here, we have known 
we've had now for 3 months since the end of the fiscal year, almost 3 
months since the end of the fiscal year, and all of these bills have 
been put forward in conference in continuing resolutions, and the final 
continuing resolution ends on the 18 of December, 10 days away. The 
bill that we have before us is the Transportation, Treasury bill.
  My ranking member, Mr. Latham, I want to express my strong 
appreciation for all the work that he has done on the legislation thus 
far that is the carrying legislation here. And he has mentioned that 
there are several bills that are being added, and I'm not going to 
exactly repeat those because they are already now a part of the Record, 
and they do not complete our--there is one left. There is a Defense 
bill that is left.
  So we are in a time constraint. We need to move. We have a situation 
that we understand quite well if I were to go through and list the 
dates on which the Senate acted finally on several of these bills, they 
have been passed in the Senate in the case of Commerce at least and 
Veterans Affairs and Military Construction, but they weren't passed in 
the Senate until well after the end of the fiscal year 2009. All of our 
bills have been passed through the House by the end of fiscal year 
2009. So we were ready to move forward with individual bills at a much 
earlier stage.
  As I have already stated, we cannot guarantee 72 hours. It would be 
nice in a perfect world to be able to do that. But we must get this 
legislation done, or we are putting enormous pressures on the executive 
Departments of this government and on our own procedures as we move 
forward toward the appropriations process for fiscal year 2011, which 
comes quickly on the tail of getting finished with the needs that we 
have for finishing fiscal year 2010.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. LATHAM. Madam Speaker, while I appreciate the chairman reciting 
history, also you should look at fiscal year 2006 when every bill was 
passed individually, signed into law in regular order with an open, 
free process. And so I think that is a model that we should all be 
looking for, and hopefully that would be the case. And there's no 
reason to put all of these bills together. And certainly there's no 
reason that we shouldn't have enough time to look at--it's about a half 
a trillion dollars of spending--to have 72 hours to finally look at the 
bill.
  Again, Madam Speaker, there really is no controversy here. This is a 
simple motion to instruct, directing the committee to, number one, keep 
the THUD bill clean and within its scope of the conference, and, number 
two, to allow the conference agreement to be available to conferees 72 
hours in advance of final passage.
  I ask for a ``yes'' vote.
  I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. OLVER. Madam Speaker, I would just like to reiterate that the 
bill that we are considering bringing to conference this morning is the 
Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies 
bill.
  I want to thank, again, my ranking member. This is his first year 
that Mr. Latham has been the ranking member, and I have enjoyed greatly 
the communications that we have had, sporadic as they have been. We 
work kind of in fits and starts because there has been a lot of waiting 
in the process to get to where we are today.
  But I want to thank him in particular for the cooperation and the 
work that he and his staff have done. And I would name the minority 
clerk, Dena Baron, and on the minority side David Gibbons and Allison 
Peters and Janine Scianna. And on our side, I want to give the 
strongest praise to our staff and to our clerk and that staff with Kate 
Hallahan, who has given me a list that doesn't even have her name on 
it. She is so modest here. David Napoliello, Kate Hallahan, Laura 
Hogshead, Alex Gillen, Sylvia Garcia who is, in this lengthened 
process, a replacement in the middle of the process of bringing out 
this legislation for a previous staff member who has now gone on to 
greener pastures.
  And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.
  Mr. LATHAM. I want to express my appreciation to the chairman for his 
patience. This has been a difficult process. As he mentioned, we start 
and stop, start and stop and back and forth; but it has been a real 
pleasure for me in my first year on this subcommittee to work with the 
chairman. And while we don't always agree on everything, we always have 
a very, very open dialogue. And I appreciate that very much.
  Again, Madam Speaker, this really is very simple. With all the money 
that we are spending in this bill that we are pulling together a bunch 
of extraneous bills that have nothing to do with Transportation and 
HUD, the idea that we should just limit the conference to this bill, 
there are other avenues for doing the other bills. And certainly when 
you are spending this much money, there is no doubt that people should 
have a chance, at least 72 hours, to look at this bill in advance of 
passage.
  I would ask for a ``yes'' vote.
  I yield back the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. All time for debate having expired, without 
objection, the previous question is ordered.
  There was no objection.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion to instruct.
  The question was taken; and the Speaker pro tempore announced that 
the noes appeared to have it.
  Mr. LATHAM. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, further 
proceedings on this question will be postponed.

[[Page H13558]]



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