[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 19]
[House]
[Page 26812]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



        COMMITTING ENOUGH MONEY TO THE EDUCATION OF OUR CHILDREN

  (Mr. GREEN of Texas asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, the entire appropriations process 
has been short circuited because of the Labor-HHS-Education 
appropriations bill. This is wrong. It is the very last appropriations 
bill that we are going to be considering. In fact, it should have been 
marked up and dealt with the first, instead of last. And here it is, 
being brought to the floor without going through the Committee on 
Rules. It was crafted in some back room, and it is squeezed into a 
conference committee report that was already vetoed by the President, 
the District of Columbia Appropriations Act. Now, is that not the tail 
wagging the dog?
  Education appropriations is so important to the whole country, and 
yet we are going to piggyback the District of Columbia appropriations 
bill out of the conference committee. The bill has a 1.4 percent cut in 
education spending, which works out to be $400 million. The funding for 
education is $100 million below what the President asked for and $700 
million below what our colleagues in the Senate passed.
  This bill would eliminate one of our most important initiatives, 
class size reduction, by making it into a $1.2 billion block grant.
  I had the opportunity yesterday to be in Houston before I came back 
to Washington, and saw the success of Title I funding and bilingual 
funding in our Houston schools.

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