[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 23]
[House]
[Page 32138]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 CONSOLIDATED APPROPRIATIONS CONFERENCE REPORT LEAVES MANY VICTIMS IN 
                                ITS WAKE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Renzi). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) is 
recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, yesterday was December 7, known as the Day 
of Infamy, so named by the great President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 
Mr. Speaker, I suggest this evening that this day is a kind of day of 
infamy for this House, particularly with the passage of this conference 
report. This conference report contains within it so many violations of 
basic democracy in this House that this day will not soon be forgotten, 
which is why I make the analogy that I did.
  The conference report leaves many victims in its wake. Let me name 
just a few of them. It is a 50/50 country. But if you were not of the 
majority party, if you are among the independents, you had little 
participation in this final product. Or if you happened to live in the 
wrong State or the wrong district, even though it might be closely 
held, you will look long and hard before finding your place in this 
conference report.
  And help you, help you if you are in the low or middle classes of our 
country because you have been sacrificed time and time again in this 
report to big corporations, to wealthy Americans. If you are among the 
millions of what I call the disfavored elderly who will get little or 
no help from the prescription drug Medicare bill, you will not find 
yourselves among the bills we have passed this year on prescription 
drugs. The most unfortunate of you are the long-term unemployed. 
Unbelievably, this is the second Christmas Congress has gone home to 
leave the long-term unemployed with no relief to face the Christmas and 
the new year with a rough, rather than a happy, holiday. I do not know 
how the House could have done that, at least for these long-term 
unemployed.
  But the victims, Mr. Speaker, are also in this body and in the 
Senate. The Republicans themselves are going to have to face the music 
when they go home to face the 8 million who will lose their overtime 
pay and be informed of it just in time for Christmas. It is going to be 
some Christmas for them. This Republican House voted decisively to 
eliminate their overtime pay, but they must have heard from them 
because when it came time for the motion to instruct, all of a sudden 
we had a majority with us against the provision to eliminate overtime 
pay. What happened? Their own majority reversed them. So now they have 
got to go back home and try to say, I was for you, but I am in the 
party that was against you. How do you explain that?
  On the Senate side, there are any number of provisions, which is why 
this conference report is likely to go nowhere before Christmas. Let me 
just pluck one analogous example. The Senate has surely heard from the 
American people on vouchers. They just did not have the votes to do 
anything on D.C. vouchers. Why? Because everybody's school district is 
being cut because of 3 years of a poor economy under this President. 
Because our promise to fund disabled children is an unkept promise of 
the decades. Because our promise to fund No Child Left Behind is $9 
billion in the hole. The Senate was not about to vote for any D.C. 
vouchers. What happened? Passed one House, never passed the other, pops 
up in this bill. You think that is democracy? If it happened only one 
time to one or two bills, that would be one thing. Sprinkled 
throughout, this bill is just strewn with this kind of undemocratic 
authoritarian dealing, more typical of countries that we criticize. But 
the villain in this piece has seldom been spoken of because it is not 
only the Republican majority, Mr. Speaker; it is the Republican 
President. We do not see his face here, but we have felt his big 
footprint, his one-man approach to this bill; and he has offended many 
members of both parties, especially in the Senate.
  I predict this day that this bill will not get through the other 
body. I do not think the Senate is about to bless a bill that imposes 
the will of one man of the majority on the House and the Senate alike. 
This term we have changed the very character of this House. We need to 
come back no longer seeking comity and bipartisanship. We need to make 
the goal of the House to return to its ancient democratic traditions.

                          ____________________