[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 16517-16518]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 16517]]

          D.C. APPROPRIATION PASSES UNANIMOUSLY FROM COMMITTEE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2001, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. 
Norton) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor not to take the whole 
hour, but for a few minutes because the D.C. appropriation today passed 
in full committee under the chair of the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. 
Knollenberg) and the ranking member, the gentleman from Pennsylvania 
(Mr. Fattah). This was a noteworthy subcommittee markup.
  Mr. Speaker, the controversy often associated with the D.C. 
appropriation was not there today. The bill passed unanimously. One 
important reason for this, indeed the most important reason for the 
smooth way in which the bill transacted its way through the committee 
today was its chairman, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg). 
Like a laser beam, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg) has 
been focused on the clear obligation of the chair of an appropriation 
subcommittee, and that is to get his bill to the floor as clean as he 
can get it so that it can get the necessary votes on the floor from 
both sides of the aisle.
  I appreciate the way this bill was handled in subcommittee today, 
especially in contrast to when the District of Columbia appropriation 
finally got out of the House last year. It was in December, remember. 
The appropriation year ends September 30. My colleagues can imagine the 
hardship on our local jurisdiction that does not get its budget until 
almost Christmas. It was so late even when we got the bill itself out, 
that was sometime in November, it was held over in order to be the 
vehicle to carry other appropriations that had had difficulty getting 
out of committee.
  So here we had the spectre of a local jurisdiction not being able to 
spend its own money while the bill was held hostage for Federal 
appropriations. It seems to me there is something in reverse order 
about that, that the smallest appropriation was being held to carry 
gigantic appropriations like HHS over.
  I am deeply grateful that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) 
helped me get this bill out. I went to his office and described the 
hardship. I asked Mayor Tony Williams to help me describe it. With the 
help of the Speaker, we finally got our bill out in December.
  What the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg) has done is to 
take a first step toward avoiding any kind of train wreck of that kind 
for the District of Columbia.

                              {time}  1730

  Perhaps it will not happen because, if there are riders on our 
appropriation, get yourself ready for a fight. But if there are, they 
certainly will not be there because the chairman has been an enabler of 
such extraneous, irrelevant, undemocratic riders.
  True to his word, the chairman himself respected local decision-
making, and the way he did so was by announcing in advance shortly 
after he assumed the chairmanship that he did not want any riders in 
his appropriation. I do not think I have heard that for a very long 
time; but when a chairman says that, I think you will get a lot of 
respect from Members of the House because he is announcing how he wants 
his own appropriation to be handled.
  He went further. In the Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg) looked at a project we in the 
District and I here in the House and with Members of the Senate for a 
couple years now have been working on.
  Since home rule, there have been riders willy-nilly put on the 
District of Columbia's appropriation that went to operations and went 
to finances. Many of these are redundant of Federal law. They are 
redundant of District law. They are so out of date some of them that if 
they were, in fact, to be acted on they could cause a catastrophe.
  What happens is they kind of stay on. The White House, seeing them 
on, carries them over from year to year; and so there are attachments 
to the District's appropriation that I think will embarrass this House 
because they have nothing to do with today. They are ancient. It is as 
if they were written in the last century.
  We thought that such riders could do real harm. Because they are 
there and until they are gone, you are supposed to do what they say.
  The fact that they are redundant or out of date does not mean that 
you are not supposed to do what they say, and they really cause great 
confusion in the local community that tries to abide by what indeed the 
Congress has said.
  We worked hard last year while Mr. Clinton was in office and this 
year as well to see whether we could get the White House to agree with 
us that certain riders were operational and financial riders were no 
longer applicable and then to work with the District to see they were 
no longer applicable.
  We did, and to his credit a great many of these riders, 35 of them, 
have been removed by Chairman Knollenberg.
  I regret to say that there are controversial riders that, of course, 
remain on our appropriation. They have been there for eternity, through 
Democratic and Republican Houses and Presidents. They are the kind of 
riders that hundreds of jurisdictions in the United States of America 
do not regard as riders at all because they have decided that those are 
the kinds of things they do not want to do.
  Then there are hundreds of jurisdictions that have decided they want 
to do precisely what the Congress has forbidden us to do, and the 
chairman of the Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, the gentleman 
from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg), could not do anything about those; and 
we do not hold him accountable to those.
  Those, of course, are riders of the most controversial kind in this 
House. Riders, for example, under domestic partners that allow domestic 
partners in the District no matter what their sexual orientation. I 
guess most of them in the District would not be gay, but would allow a 
domestic partner to pay for the health benefits of his partner if the 
person worked for the District government with no cost to the District 
government.
  Hundreds of jurisdictions allow that all across the United States. 
Many more private corporations allow it. It is a matter of when you 
consider the cost of health care, seems to me that anybody would want 
to help somebody get health insurance who wanted to pay for it and get 
on a group plan, particularly at a time when there are very serious 
consequences to not doing so.
  There is one that this House rebels against that, again, all across 
the United States can be found. Members, I am sure, will vote against 
it. Live in places where this is done and, that is, riders allowing the 
local jurisdiction to pay for abortions for poor women out of its own 
funds.
  Respecting the fact that this body has said you cannot pay for 
abortions out of Federal funds, you will not find a big city in the 
United States and many small towns which do not decide to pay for 
abortions out of their own local funds. Only with your Nation's capital 
does the Congress say no Federal and no local funds can be used, and 
they say so for these two items; and they have said so for other 
matters in the past.
  Everybody who votes for it knows it is wrong. They know it flies in 
the face of Federalism, not to mention devolution. We will continue to 
fight those. We know that the chairman of the Subcommittee on the 
District of Columbia, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg), 
was in no position to do anything about them; and the burden is on us 
to convince this body.
  We accept that burden and we must find a way out of that dilemma so 
that we are treated in exactly the same way as every other jurisdiction 
in the United States.
  I am a fourth generation Washingtonian. I can trace my American 
ancestry back to virtually the beginning of

[[Page 16518]]

the 19th century. The fact that before slavery some of them believed 
they would find a better life in the District of Columbia and walked 
off the plantation should not mean that today the District of Columbia 
has fewer rights than any other local jurisdiction and that nobody in 
my family for four generations has had the same rights as every other 
Member of this body. I take it personally. And, of course, I take it as 
my obligation to do something about it for 600,000 people who live in 
the District of Columbia.
  I want to also pay tribute to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young), 
the chair of the Committee on Appropriations. Every year the gentleman 
from Florida tries to help the District of Columbia get its 
appropriation out. Again he is simply doing his duty as chairman. He 
wants to get his appropriations through. He has a well-known desire not 
to have riders cloud up his various subcommittee appropriations, and he 
does whatever he can to ward them off and to try to facilitate Members 
in getting their bills through.
  I appreciate that the gentleman from Florida has met every year with 
our new Mayor, actually he is in his third year now, who has done so 
well in our city, Tony Williams, and tried to help us to design a way 
to get our appropriation in and out. It ought to be the fastest and the 
easiest of all 13 appropriations. It is not your money; it is ours. 
When it comes to the hard work the Members do here, and they do work 
very hard, you would think that coming to the D.C. appropriation would 
be a rest period for the Members of this body. Instead, it has tended 
to be among the most controversial when it affects nobody in this body. 
I want to say not only that Speaker Hastert has been very helpful to 
this city in trying to move the appropriation but the gentleman from 
Florida has been very helpful as well.
  Finally, I must say a word about the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Fattah), who is the ranking member of the Subcommittee on the District 
of Columbia. This is the first time that the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania has been on the Committee on Appropriations at all. He is 
so clever that he managed to get himself a chairmanship straight off 
because of the way the bidding is done. But what marvelous good fortune 
it is for the District of Columbia because the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania comes from a jurisdiction much like our own. He is the 
first big-city Member to serve in such a position on our committee 
since Julian Dixon, the much revered chair of the Subcommittee on the 
District of Columbia for 14 years who died last year.
  The gentleman from Pennsylvania not only comes from a similar 
jurisdiction just a few hundred miles up the East Coast, but he comes 
from a jurisdiction that has been through exactly what the District of 
Columbia went through about 5 years ago when it had to get a control 
board. So what we have is a ranking member who was the prime mover in 
getting a control board for the city of Philadelphia which sprang back 
as a result of it. Now the District of Columbia has sprung back as a 
result of both the work of the control board and of our Mayor and city 
council. We have a ranking member who has a deep understanding of big 
cities, their finances and their educational systems in particular.
  What the gentleman from Pennsylvania brings to the Subcommittee on 
the District of Columbia is almost instinctive understanding of what 
should pertain here for this city, an instinctive empathy with 
residents who live and have to watch as the Congress of the United 
States doubles back over what its own Mayor and city council have 
approved in their budget and sometimes in their laws.
  And so, Mr. Speaker, thanks to the chairman and the ranking member 
and the cooperation of the full committee, I might add, the D.C. bill 
is on its way to full committee. I come to the floor this evening to 
ask that the full committee show this kind of respect for the 
independent jurisdiction that is your Nation's capital, the District of 
Columbia, that the chairman has shown; that we follow his lead and that 
out of committee come a bill that is at least as clean as the bill was 
when it was passed off today to the full committee.
  Mr. Speaker, we have many miles to go before this session is over. I 
hope and pray we are not here as long as we were last year. But if we 
spend a lot of time ruminating about the District of Columbia, we may 
well be here. You have got yourself a Republican President now. I think 
he wants to sign bills and not veto them, although I must say unless 
you get this surplus matter figured out, you are likely to have a 
Republican President vetoing bills that came from a Republican House. 
In any case, I want us all to focus on getting out of here and getting 
these bills, which are already very late, done.
  I think that the last thing that should make us tarry is a local 
jurisdiction unrelated to your own business and your own district. I 
ask that you respect the work of our chairman, the gentleman from 
Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg), allow a clean bill to come out of the full 
committee and then out of this House. And, of course, I ask you to 
respect the 600,000 people who live in the Nation's capital, who are 
second per capita in Federal income taxes and ask of you only that you 
let them spend their own money as they see fit.

                          ____________________