Providing for Consideration of H.R. Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, Providing for Consideration of H.R. Zika Response Appropriations Act, and for Other Purposes
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 736 and ask for its immediate consideration.
The Clerk read the resolution, as follows: H. Res. 736
Resolved, That (a) at any time after adoption of this resolution the Speaker may, pursuant to clause 2(b) of rule XVIII, declare the House resolved into the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union for consideration of the bill (H.R. 4974) making appropriations for military construction, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2017, and for other purposes. The first reading of the bill shall be dispensed with. All points of order against consideration of the bill are waived. General debate shall be confined to the bill and shall not exceed one hour equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Appropriations. After general debate the bill shall be considered for amendment under the five-minute rule. Points of order against provisions in the bill for failure to comply with clause 2 of rule XXI are waived. Clause 2(e) of rule XXI shall not apply during consideration of the bill. (b) During consideration of the bill for amendment--
(1) each amendment, other than amendments provided for in paragraph (2), shall be debatable for 10 minutes equally divided and controlled by the proponent and an opponent;
(2) no pro forma amendment shall be in order except that the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Appropriations or their respective designees may offer up to 10 pro forma amendments each at any point for the purpose of debate; and
(3) the chair of the Committee of the Whole may accord priority in recognition on the basis of whether the Member offering an amendment has caused it to be printed in the portion of the Congressional Record designated for that purpose in clause 8 of rule XVIII. Amendments so printed shall be considered as read.
(c) When the committee rises and reports the bill back to the House with a recommendation that the bill do pass, the previous question shall be considered as ordered on the bill and amendments thereto to final passage without intervening motion except one motion to recommit with or without instructions. (a) (a)
Sec. 2. Upon adoption of this resolution it shall be in order to consider in the House the bill (H.R. 5243) making appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2016, to strengthen public health activities in response to the Zika virus, and for other purposes. All points of order against consideration of the bill are waived. The bill shall be considered as read. All points of order against provisions in the bill are waived. Clause 2(e) of rule XXI shall not apply during consideration of the bill. The previous question shall be considered as ordered on the bill and on any amendment thereto to final passage without intervening motion except: (1) one hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Appropriations; and (2) one motion to recommit.
Sec. 3. Section 514 of H.R. 4974 shall be considered to be a spending reduction account for purposes of section 3(d) of House Resolution 5.
Sec. 4. During consideration of H.R. 4974 in the Committee of the Whole pursuant to this resolution, it shall not be in order to consider an amendment proposing both a decrease in an appropriation designated pursuant to section 251(b)(2)(A)(ii) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 and an increase in an appropriation not so designated, or vice versa.
Sec. 5. During consideration of H.R. 4974 pursuant to this resolution-- (a) section 310 of House Concurrent Resolution 125, as reported in the House, shall have force and effect in the Committee of the Whole; and
(b) section 3304 of Senate Concurrent Resolution 11 shall not apply.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only. General Leave
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Rules Committee met and reported a rule for consideration of both H.R. 5243, the Zika Response Appropriations Act of 2016, and H.R. 4974, the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2017.
The rule provides for consideration of H.R. 5243 under a closed rule with an hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations, along with a motion to recommit.
In addition, the rule provides for an open rule for consideration of the MILCON-VA appropriations bill for FY 2017. It also provides for a motion to recommit on the MILCON-VA bill.
Finally, Mr. Speaker, the rule includes three budget provisions, which allow for the enforcement of the OCO firewall, allow for Members to deposit savings from their amendments in a spending reduction account, and provides limitations on advance appropriations consistent with the budget resolution.
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present H.R. 5243 to the House for its consideration. As I said in the Rules Committee yesterday, the debate over this legislation isn't about whether or not we provide resources for Zika, it is about whether or not we pay for it through our existing resources or just add it to the national debt. I am pleased that we have chosen the former course.
Mr. Speaker, H.R. 5243 provides an additional $622.1 million, for a total of over $1.2 billion to fight the Zika outbreak. H.R. 5243 provides additional money to the Centers for Disease Control for mosquito control and programs for prenatal care, delivery, and postpartum care. In addition, we provide the NIH with the resources needed to develop vaccines and diagnostic tests.
In addition, as opposed to the President's request, this legislation maintains important oversight restrictions on the use of these funds. Understandably, they must be used solely for Zika. The President's supplemental request, in addition to not being paid for, would allow the so-called emergency funds to be used for almost anything.
Importantly, Mr. Speaker, this legislation is fully offset by using leftover, unobligated Ebola funds and the unused Health and Human Services administrative funding. In addition, Mr. Speaker, this legislation reflects the emergency of this situation by making these funds available through the end of this fiscal year.
Yesterday, Chairman Rogers told the Rules Committee that a standalone piece of legislation stands the best chance of becoming law. If we were to attach this measure as part of one of the fiscal year 2017 appropriations bills, as the Senate has done, there is no guarantee that it would be enacted swiftly. In my opinion, the best way to ensure its quick enactment is through standalone legislation, like H.R. 5243.
In addition to the Zika response appropriations bill, this rule allows for the consideration of the first appropriations bill considered by the House for FY 2017, the MILCON-VA appropriations bill.
I am pleased that the House is, once again, going through regular order and considering appropriations bills under an open process. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I am always proud that we can bring these bills up under an open process where all Members have the opportunity to bring their ideas for an up-or-down vote by the entire House.
H.R. 4974 provides $73.5 billion in discretionary funding for the Veterans Administration, a 3-percent increase over FY16. In addition, it includes important oversight and good government provisions, like preventing the closure of Guantanamo Bay, prohibiting bonuses for all VA Senior Executive Service personnel, and increased oversight, like requiring large-scale construction projects to be managed by an outside entity so that mistakes like the Denver VA health facility, now $1 billion over budget, will never be repeated.
I am encouraged by the hard work of Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Lowey for their commitment to regular order and ensuring that the power of the purse is one that this House can continue to exercise. Both the Zika Response Appropriations Act and the FY 2017 MILCON-VA bill demonstrate our commitment to that end.
I urge support for the rule and the underlying legislation.
I want to begin by agreeing with my friend in terms of the appropriations process itself. He is right to celebrate the appearance of one of the bills down here under an open rule, just as I am sure my friend is aware, the Committee on Appropriations, under Mr. Rogers' and Mrs. Lowey's able leadership, has actually produced a series of bills ready and lined up. So I have no doubt this is the first of many bills--I would hope all bills--that we eventually see on the floor that every Member has an opportunity to come down here and amend as they see fit.
I also want to appreciate what my friend had to say about the VA and military construction bill. I think he is absolutely correct. That is one of our very best subcommittees. Chairman Dent and Congressman Bishop are chair and ranking member. They work together extremely well. While I know my friend has some concerns with specific provisions of that, again, this is a process. As he knows, this is our opening process. We will see what happens. I think at the end of the day, that particular legislation will garner a great deal of bipartisan support, in part because of the very points my good friend made in talking about the bill.
Now let's move to Zika. Here, we obviously have a different point of view. Let me posit some things, Mr. Speaker, that perhaps those watching this debate and discussion aren't aware of.
First, $600 million has already been deployed for Zika. That was out of money set aside for both Ebola and other infectious diseases. That money, by the way, totaled over $5 billion originally. There is still close to $3 billion of it left. It was to be spent over several years.
So when the President made his request, the initial response from Chairman Rogers was, spend this money now. Don't wait on Congress to act. You have got available resources. The administration eventually agreed with that point of view.
So to this point, nothing has been left undone because of money. Everything the Federal Government has wanted to do has been fully funded. And, indeed, in that fund, there is still well over $2 billion, so literally everything it plans to do in the timeframe it plans to do it can be done. So that is $600 million of the $1.9 billion immediately available.
This bill would provide another $622 million, which is actually more money than the administration plans to spend in this fiscal year. So they will have more than enough resources. In the bill, there is actually money included for the National Institutes of Health that will not be spent until next year as they work through the process of developing vaccines and diagnostics. So there is more than adequate funding here.
Finally, in the remainder of the year, when we get to the Labor-HHS bill and the foreign operations bill, we will put in literally hundreds of millions more money for fiscal year 2017. That $1.9 billion isn't to be used right now. It is to be used over a 2-year period, so you don't need all of it right now.
The key difference is not the amount of money. The key difference is, number one, this is offset. My friend is correct about that. It is paid for. Rather than saying we are going to just immediately add an additional $1.9 billion to the national debt, say: Look, we have money set aside; we have got money here we can offset through other unused funds, and we have got money in the regular appropriations process for next year.
All of this can and should be paid for. Frankly, it is not like a Hurricane Sandy or a Hurricane Katrina with massive damage, immediate response required. This is actually smaller, more manageable, and these are moneys spent over not a short period of time, but over a couple of years. So this is actually the prudent way to actually move forward on this money.
But again, the important thing to know is everything that has needed to be done has been done. There hasn't been anything delayed. Nothing has been set back. Frankly, what Mr. Rogers offers us will actually speed money to the process.
The debate, here again, as I said in my opening remarks, isn't about Zika; it is about whether or not you want to pay for the response, and that requires some tough choices to be made. That means other things that aren't emergency might not get as much funding.
The administration, like anybody else, if they can have their cake and eat it too, is delighted to do so. The more prudent path is to actually pay for the emergency that you have if you can. If you can't, then you move to something bigger. But in this case, we have the ability to do that, and I think we ought to do it.
I would hope our friends work with us on this. We see that this is an emergency. We have provided money immediately. We are moving now, prudently, to provide additional money, more than is needed in the short term and, frankly, as the bills roll out, you will see that there will be additional money yet to come--money that, by the way, was not intended to be spent until next year anyway. So there is no reason to spend it all right now.
Mr. Speaker,
Let me begin by thanking my good friend for her wonderful work on that committee. She has had the opportunity to serve on her subcommittee when she was a subcommittee chairman and now to work with her ranking member. There is no better person than Nita Lowey on that committee.
However, we are going to disagree a little bit here. First of all, when you say the bill only provides a third, of course, you have already got a third. The first $600 million is the first third. That has already been deployed. It is being spent. This is the next third. The remaining third is money that will be spent--by the way, not this year, but next year--and it will be presented in the normal appropriations bills.
I happen to chair one of those committees, the so-called Labor-HHS Subcommittee, the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. We will have hundreds of millions of dollars in that bill for next year's Zika response. So to suggest that somebody is being shortchanged, the money is just being prudently laid out at an appropriate pace and paid for along the way. That is point number one.
Point number two, again, this isn't a debate about the disease. It was this committee and our chairman who immediately responded and said: You have extra money left.
Now, by the way, the Ebola money, if you go back and look at the legislation, is Ebola and other infectious diseases.
In other words, when Congress appropriated that, they knew they might be appropriating more than was needed for Ebola and there might be other crises to come up. So that money is being used exactly the way it is supposed to be used.
The Appropriations Committee has assured that both the CDC and the NIH and the administration that, should additional money be required-- and there is still almost $2 million of Ebola money--and if you need more and you are going to spend it over the next several years, come back and we will sit down and we will work with you and get you the money.
So this suggestion that somehow the fight against Ebola has been sidelined or cut short or shortchanged, again, is simply not true.
My friends use a lot of rhetoric here, largely to hide the fact that while we have got plenty of available money both set aside in the normal appropriations process and certainly in this bill of Chairman Rogers to pay for things, they just simply want to add it to the national debt. They don't want to use available resources. They don't want to operate within the normal Appropriations Committee, I guess because they want to spend that money someplace else.
To suggest that anybody is disingenuous or shortchanging either Zika or Ebola simply doesn't square with reality. It was Congress, after all--a Republican majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate, but, frankly, a genuinely bipartisan effort--that voted the $5 billion-plus for Ebola in the first place.
Last year, the President asked for a billion-dollar increase at the National Institutes of Health. We gave him a $2 billion increase. I can't remember the precise number last year, but I do remember we appropriated more for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than the President requested.
So it is not as if these things are not a priority. I think they are a priority on both sides of the aisle. We have proven that by bringing appropriations bills to the floor beyond what the President requested. But we think the prudent thing to do is not just willy-nilly add $1.9 billion worth of debt on the American taxpayer, particularly when the money is at hand to pay for what we need right now and we have an appropriations bill coming up in June where the rest of it can be taken care of and we can actually monitor this thing.
On the Ebola crisis, we may well have appropriated more than we needed to. That is why we have the other infectious diseases. In fact, if you look at the administration's budget proposal, they actually were taking $40 million out of this same pot of money to spend on unrelated malaria suppression abroad.
I am not quarreling with that--that is fine--but it suggests, again, even the administration thought, ``Well, maybe there is more money than we need in here for Ebola, or we can count on Congress to come back,'' which, by the way, is true if they need more money.
This is all about trying to circumvent the appropriations process and trying to add debt when there are sufficient resources available. If there were not, then that would be another matter. I agree with my friends: the response is important. But in this case, because the response is spread out over 2 years, you have plenty of time. And this is a relatively modest amount of money. This isn't like an $80 billion expenditure that we had for Hurricane Sandy. We can do this in a thoughtful and prudent way and avoid the debt that is associated with emergency spending.
We want to continue to work with the administration. We have demonstrated in the past that we are willing to fund NIH and CDC above administration-recommended levels. We responded quickly during the Ebola emergency. We think this is the appropriate way to go.
The Senate is moving a vehicle, as we all know. At some point, if we pass this--and I think we will--we will sit down with our friends, and we will hammer out a common response. But, again, do remember that nothing is not being done for lack of money. Everything the administration has wanted to do to date, it has had the resources to do. And we will continue to make sure that it does.
At the end of the day, we think they ought to be paid for, since we have the ability to do that. And that is what we are trying to accomplish: keep debt off the back of the American taxpayer, if we possibly can. In this case, we can and we should.
Mr. Speaker,
Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by actually agreeing with my friends and, certainly, my good friend from Texas. He is right about the danger that we are dealing with. My friend from Florida is certainly right about the severity of this. I think where they are wrong is the suggestion that nothing has been done; $600 million has been deployed.
This bill is actually a response to the very letter that my good friend from Florida read. This does provide the next third of the requested money by the administration. And, frankly, the bill extends this into next year to address the concerns my friend expressed about having a multiyear commitment.
The money in here for the National Institutes of Health, which is the lead agency in developing vaccine and diagnostics, is fully funded for what they have asked to be funded for next year. So this actually does that.
Now, we will have an additional bill through committee in June where we will provide additional resources for the CDC for next year and whatever other things needed.
The total spending here on both sides is about the same. It is being deployed right now. This is a response to some of the concerns. What concerns my friends, I think, is they would just prefer not to pay for it. They would just prefer to add it to the national debt. Well, gosh, that is a great thing to do, but that is probably how we ended up with a deficit of over half a billion dollars for FY 2017 and a national debt of over $19 trillion.
If this were something that we couldn't handle any other way--that we only had an emergency--I would agree with my friends. I did that when we had the Sandy relief. There was no other way for something that large. That is not the case here. This is $1.9 billion. Most of that money is coming out of the Labor-HHS bill, which, by the way, spends $163 billion a year.
If you can't fund $1.9 billion spaced over 2 years in a bill that provides in that period of time around $320 billion, you are just not trying.
This is all about being able to spend someplace else. And, again, not one thing has not been done. Everything that anybody in the Federal Government has wanted to do, they have been able to do. In addition, the Ebola money is not just the Ebola money; it is Ebola and other infectious diseases. That is what it was there for. It was not just meant to be spent only on Ebola.
Even after the $600 million, even after the money that is offset in this bill, which is roughly at $350 million, that fund still will have almost $2 billion in it that can deploy any way against infectious diseases that the administration says it needs, and it has the commitment of Appropriations, which has demonstrated again and again that it will do this: If you run short in this area, we will backfill. That is why we have appropriations bills moving now. We can take care of you. But we can do it within the budget limits negotiated with the administration. That is prudent management of the money.
So, given the track record here, both in responding on Ebola and putting more money in the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control than the administration expected and now moving quickly to be helpful here, I think we have either a misunderstanding or a manufactured crisis.
There is no crisis. There is a real challenge, and money needs to move toward it now. That is exactly what we have done. That is exactly what we are doing in this bill. That is exactly what we will do in the appropriations bills that will be presented in Congress as the appropriations season progresses.
With that, I want to reassure my friend that the resources will be there. They have been there thus far. They will continue to be there.
Mr. Speaker,
I want to always recognize my good friend from Texas, who is really one of my good friends in this body.
But I am not surprised that the Senate bill is twice as much money because it runs for twice the time. This bill runs to September 30th. The Senate bill runs until September 30, 2017, so they are not materially that different.
What we have said is we would deal with next year's problem in the appropriations process for this year.
Now, again, I know my friend's concern is legitimate. I do. I don't have any doubt about it. But I point out one more time, $600 million has been appropriated or has been made available. This is an additional $600 million. This $1.2 billion for the time of this fiscal year is actually more than the administration had planned to spend in this period. It reaches into next year, but they will have it available for this year if they need it.
They have another nearly $2 billion in Ebola/other infectious diseases money, and they have the assurance that additional things are coming.
The only difference here is, are you going to pay for it? Or are you just going to add it to the national credit card, another $2 billion, roughly, on the national debt, when you have the resources and the time available to operate within the appropriation system?
So this debate, as I have said repeatedly, isn't about Zika. It is about whether you pay to deal with Zika, or whether you would just like to do whatever you want to do and forget about paying for it.
Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury indefinitely. So this is a responsible, well-thought-through measure. It is fully paid for.
Nobody is short of resources, nobody will be short of resources. The money is available to do whatever the administration wants to do. It is well aware of that fact. And these are additional resources deployed here, with the assurance of other resources that will be deployed during the course of the normal appropriations process.
So I fail to see, when the amount of money is essentially the same on both sides over essentially the same period, why we keep going back and acting as if this $600 million is all there is. There is another 600 that has already been spent. There is more coming. It is coming in a regular way.
The only thing that upsets my friends on the other side is it is being paid for. I mean, how outrageous: we are actually going to pay for a government activity that is important for us to accomplish, with the assurance that if more is needed, more will be made available.
Mr. Speaker, that is the simple difference here, despite all the discussion about the disease, about readiness, is who is willing to pay for what needs to be done and who, frankly, would just prefer to put on it the national credit card.
Mr. Speaker,
My good friend, Mr. Gene Green--and he is my good friend--as I recall, those Texas legislators were called the Killer Bees. And if you want to compare them to mosquitos, I will leave you that luxury and that political risk. We just call Texas legislators welcome guests. So they are welcome to come any time.
In terms of the point, though, I think I agree with much of what you say, other than the last part of what you said about adequately, responsibly funding. That is exactly what we are doing.
The total amount of money here we are talking about, my friends keep forgetting about this $600 million that has already been deployed, and they keep suggesting that this is like only Ebola money.
That is not the way the legislation is written. It is written for Ebola and other infectious diseases. In other words, we are using that money exactly the way we are supposed to use it, not shortchanging anybody.
If we need money later--because this is money that is to be spent over multiple years--we will come back and put it in. But that money, frankly, if it had not been available, there would not have been an immediate response possible. It was available, so it is being used in the appropriate way.
This is the next third. So when we hear this talk about only a third of what the administration requested, we have already done a third. We are getting ready to do the next third, and we are telling you, in bills that are coming to the floor, both State and foreign ops, and Labor-HHS, that there will be additional money that will essentially total about what the administration has asked to spend.
We recognize that these things do develop, do change. Our understanding of them changes over time. This is actually a thoughtful way to do this. But the assurance has been made: if you need more money, then you have got it. We will work with you. We will find a way to do it. Our assistance is, if we can pay for it, then we do pay for it; and that is exactly what we do in this bill.
We hear comparisons, erroneous comparisons, you are only doing half as much as the Republicans in the Senate. No. We are doing it through September 30 of this year. They are doing it through September 30 of next year. The amounts are essentially about the same.
The difference, then, is also the same, frankly, with all due respect to my friends in the Senate, we are offsetting and paying for this. And that just seems, to us, the prudent way to do it, not to put more debt on the back of the American taxpayer when you don't have to.
If we had some emergency that called for hundreds of billions of dollars or something of that nature, that would be different. That is not what we are dealing with here.
Now, I have a lot of respect for my friend's concerns, but the chairman of our committee actually led a delegation to South America partially on this issue recently. I happened to have the privilege of going along with Chairman Rogers.
We stopped in Peru, where there is a Naval research station we have operated for decades. It normally focuses on tropical diseases--we have a lot of issues with that when our military is deployed in those areas--but it is working around the clock on Zika and is doing some great work.
Then we went to Brazil, which is really the epicenter of this outbreak; sat down and talked with the Centers for Disease Control people on the ground, which we did; talked with the Brazilian government, which we did; saw, as Brazil was deploying literally hundreds of thousands, 220,000 of its own military personnel, to go door to door.
So I think probably Chairman Rogers has as good a grasp, with all due respect, as anybody in this body on what is being done, what needs to be done, and how to proceed.
At every step along the way, he has shown that resources are going to be made available. They have been, but they are being made available in a responsible, prudent way, with appropriate oversight, in a timely manner, but in a manner which is offset and paid for.
That is what I think the American people want us to do: take care of what is important, do it right, do it responsibly, and pay for it if you have the funds available before you automatically add it to the credit card that our kids and grandkids are going to someday have to pay off.
So we will continue to work with our friends. We will work with our colleagues in the Senate. But to suggest for 1 minute that the Federal Government doesn't have the resources it needs, when it has much more than it has asked sitting still unobligated in funds, is just simply not the case. It has the money it needs. It is getting the resources in the right way. We are simply paying for them.
I know that is hard for some of my friends to accept, but it is actually the appropriate way to proceed. We actually should do more of this in this body rather than less.
Mr. Speaker,
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, in closing, I want to thank, as always, my good friend from Florida. He is truly a delight to work with, one of the really great Members in this body. Not surprisingly, he knows I disagree with him on his characterization of the current Congress, because saying that we haven't done anything is forgetting what has actually happened.
This is the first Congress to pass a multiyear highway bill since 2005 and the first one to overhaul common education since 2002. Last week, we had opioid legislation on this floor that we all know is critical and is certainly going to come into law, and it will be funded. We had the first real human trafficking bill; an overhaul of the Veterans Administration; a budget agreement that meant we had no closures and no debt crisis; more funding for the National Institutes of Health--it has been one of the central issues in this debate--than the President asked for last year, more new funding; and the same thing for the Centers for Disease Control. So I actually argue it has been a pretty productive Congress in many, many ways.
In terms of Zika, though, let's again get back and just clarify things. The President asked for $1.9 billion in emergency funding. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee immediately said: You have got plenty of money. Use whatever you want; $600 million of that was used. If you need that replenished, we will replenish that in the normal course of appropriations.
He now brings to the floor a bill that carries the next third of the funding that the administration has asked for, fully offset, money that is more than they expect to spend from now until September 30. Some of that money is available into next year, certainly the money that the NIH would need for diagnostics and vaccines. We will bring to the floor the rest of it.
So the only thing that we really differ on is should we pay for this major effort or not when we have the resources. We have the resources. Ours is paid for. The administration's proposal is not. It is just that simple. Do you just want to add $1.9 billion, or do you want to responsibly work the problem?
This committee, the Appropriations Committee, has been at the forefront of responding to this every step along the way. It will continue to do so. We will work with our friends.
In closing, Mr. Speaker, the Constitution gives the Congress the power of the purse. Article I, section 9 gives that authority to Congress. While the President has every right and duty to submit a supplemental appropriations request, it is the duty of Congress to examine that request and provide for the funds and conditions it feels appropriate to execute them. That is exactly what we have done on Zika, and that is exactly what we have done on MILCON-VA.
With that in mind, I would encourage my friends to support the rule and the underlying legislation.
The material previously referred to by Mr. Hastings is as follows: An amendment to H. Res. 736 Offered by Mr. Hastings
At the end of the resolution, add the following new sections:
Sec. 6. Immediately upon adoption of this resolution the Speaker shall, pursuant to clause 2(b) of rule XVIII, declare the House resolved into the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union for consideration of the bill (H.R. 5044) making supplemental appropriations for fiscal year 2016 to respond to Zika virus. The first reading of the bill shall be dispensed with. All points of order against consideration of the bill are waived. General debate shall be confined to the bill and shall not exceed one hour equally divided among and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Appropriations and the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on the Budget. After general debate the bill shall be considered for amendment under the five-minute rule. All points of order against provisions in the bill are waived. At the conclusion of consideration of the bill for amendment the Committee shall rise and report the bill to the House with such amendments as may have been adopted. The previous question shall be considered as ordered on the bill and amendments thereto to final passage without intervening motion except one motion to recommit with or without instructions. If the Committee of the Whole rises and reports that it has come to no resolution on the bill, then on the next legislative day the House shall, immediately after the third daily order of business under clause 1 of rule XIV, resolve into the Committee of the Whole for further consideration of the bill.
Sec. 7. Clause 1(c) of rule XLX shall not apply to the consideration of H.R. 5044. ____ The Vote on the Previous Question: What It Really Means
This vote, the vote on whether to order the previous question on a special rule, is not merely a procedural vote. A vote against ordering the previous question is a vote against the Republican majority agenda and a vote to allow the Democratic minority to offer an alternative plan. It is a vote about what the House should be debating.
Mr. Clarence Cannon's Precedents of the House of Representatives (VI, 308-311), describes the vote on the previous question on the rule as ``a motion to direct or control the consideration of the subject before the House being made by the Member in charge.'' To defeat the previous question is to give the opposition a chance to decide the subject before the House. Cannon cites the Speaker's ruling of January 13, 1920, to the effect that ``the refusal of the House to sustain the demand for the previous question passes the control of the resolution to the opposition'' in order to offer an amendment. On March 15, 1909, a member of the majority party offered a rule resolution. The House defeated the previous question and a member of the opposition rose to a parliamentary inquiry, asking who was entitled to recognition. Speaker Joseph G. Cannon (R-Illinois) said: ``The previous question having been refused, the gentleman from New York, Mr. Fitzgerald, who had asked the gentleman to yield to him for an amendment, is entitled to the first recognition.''
The Republican majority may say ``the vote on the previous question is simply a vote on whether to proceed to an immediate vote on adopting the resolution . . . . [and] has no substantive legislative or policy implications whatsoever.'' But that is not what they have always said. Listen to the Republican Leadership Manual on the Legislative Process in the United States House of Representatives, (6th edition, page 135). Here's how the Republicans describe the previous question vote in their own manual: ``Although it is generally not possible to amend the rule because the majority Member controlling the time will not yield for the purpose of offering an amendment, the same result may be achieved by voting down the previous question on the rule . . . . When the motion for the previous question is defeated, control of the time passes to the Member who led the opposition to ordering the previous question. That Member, because he then controls the time, may offer an amendment to the rule, or yield for the purpose of amendment.''
In Deschler's Procedure in the U.S. It is one of the only available tools for those who oppose the Republican majority's agenda and allows those with alternative views the opportunity to offer an alternative plan.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source