Relating to Consideration of the Senate Amendment to H.R. Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 751 and ask for its immediate consideration.

The Clerk read the resolution, as follows: H. Res. 751

Resolved, That upon adoption of this resolution-- (a) the House hereby takes from the Speaker's table the bill (H.R. 2577) making appropriations for the Departments of Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2016, and for other purposes, with the Senate amendment thereto, and concurs in the Senate amendment with an amendment consisting of the text of Rules Committee Print 114-56; and

(b) it shall be in order for the chair of the Committee on Appropriations or his designee to move that the House insist on its amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 2577 and request a conference with the Senate thereon.

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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), 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
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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Rules Committee met and reported a rule to expedite consideration of legislation that would deal with the imminent threat of the Zika virus. The rule provides that the House concur in the Senate amendment with a further amendment consisting of the text of H.R. 4974, H.R. 5243, and H.R. 897, as passed by the House, and provides a motion from the chair of the Committee on Appropriations to request a conference with the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, as I said last week, the debate between Republicans and Democrats is not over whether or not to address the Zika threat, but whether to pay for it or just to add it to the national credit card.

This rule would provide for a conference between the House and the Senate on the Zika response legislation, as passed by the House. As opposed to the Senate approach, which adds an additional $1.2 billion to the national debt, the House approach acts responsibly by using existing funds designated for Ebola and other infectious diseases to pay for our response to the looming Zika threat.

Mr. Speaker, many of my friends on the other side have claimed that the House Republicans' response to the Zika threat has been wholly insufficient. Frankly, I disagree with that view. In our view, our response is, really, the second of three tranches of funds directed at Zika.

First, Chairman Rogers, Chairman Granger, and I directed the administration to use existing funds for Ebola and other infectious diseases to deal with the immediate threat. Thus far, the administration has used nearly $600 million to support efforts to combat Zika.

The second tranche of money that is included in this legislation would provide an additional $622 million for Zika.

Finally, I want to assure my colleagues that we will commit additional resources in the FY 2017 appropriations process to ensure that the administration request is fully fulfilled, providing nearly $1.9 billion, which is the amount requested by the administration to combat Zika.

In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to reiterate that I do not disagree with my friends about the need to confront the Zika virus quickly. In fact, I have been to Brazil. I have been to Argentina.

I have visited the infected areas and have spent a lot of hours in talking to our people on the ground there who are both investigating the disease and working with local governments to try and take care of some of the outbreak down there.

We have visited extensively with our friends up here at the National Institutes of Health and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The only difference I have with my friends is whether or not we pay for the activity.

I believe, Mr. Speaker, that, if we already have the resources to confront the crisis, which we do, we should do so within our existing capabilities as opposed to adding to the deficit.

I look forward to working with my colleagues in conference, through regular order, to ensure a bipartisan agreement can be reached. I urge my colleagues to support the rule and the underlying legislation.

I begin by pointing out to my good friend that, actually, we are doing, in a sense, what he is urging us to do right now. We are moving expeditiously to go to conference with our friends in the Senate, who have passed one version of the Zika response.

We will have our version. We will sit down and work out a compromise, and I suspect we will be able to move pretty smartly through this. What we are doing here today is exactly what I know my friend wants us to do, and that is to move and respond.

I also point out--and it gets lost in the rhetoric sometimes around this issue--that there is not one thing the Federal Government has proposed to do about Zika that it has been unable to do because of a lack of money. The Federal Government has had every cent that it has asked for.

Frankly, it was Hal Rogers, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, who solicited Ms. Granger, the chairman of the Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Agencies, and I, as the chair of the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, to write the administration and tell them to start spending money immediately from the things they had. Then that money would be backfilled as needed during the normal appropriations process.

That is exactly what has been done. No measure has failed to be implemented because of a lack of money. There has been no delay in money for the Zika response, and there are substantial efforts to move ahead in this regard.

My friend made the point that we sometimes seem to ignore the advice of scientists. That is just simply not true. For Ebola last year, the administration got the response it wanted out of this Congress immediately. Frankly, it has gotten an immediate response out of Zika.

I point out to my friend--he may not be aware of this because he is not on the Appropriations Committee--that last year the President of the United States asked for $1 billion for additional research at the National Institutes of Health. We gave him $2 billion.

He asked for a certain amount of money--forgive me for not remembering the exact figure--for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We gave him more money than he asked for. This year we will do that again. He has made requests for additional money.

We will go beyond what he has requested at both the National Institutes of Health and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So in suggesting we are not funding these efforts robustly, the truth is, if you look at the numbers, we are actually spending more money than the President asked for because we think these are national priorities.

While we listen to scientists, we also listen to economists. They tell us that running up a national debt willy-nilly is not a very good thing to do. In this case, we have the money and we have the time to deal with this in a thoughtful and prudent way and to advance the efforts without running up the national debt. It is the appropriate way to proceed.

I would just ask my friend to think back. When we hear this figure, this is only a third of the response. Somehow my friends on the other side have forgotten that the first third is already done. That was the first $600 million that is being deployed as we speak. This is the next third.

Frankly, it reaches not only the balance for the remainder of this fiscal year, but it reaches into next year. This is more money, once we pass this, than the administration has proposed to deploy in this fiscal or even this calendar year.

Then, in the normal appropriations process, which is underway right now--the bill will probably be presented sometime in the middle of June to the Appropriations Committee--you will see additional money in both the State and Foreign Operations bill and in the Labor-H bill that is targeted toward Zika. The one difference is it will all have been paid for.

I think that is what shocks my friends the most. They would much prefer to save that money so as to spend it someplace else. We think it is a crisis. We have the money. We ought to spend the money right now and take care of Zika.

We are going to continue to work with our friends, and I think we will arrive at a good place. My hope is that that measure that we enact at the end is fully paid for. That is what we are trying to achieve here.

Mr. Speaker, what is unconscionable is to make charges that are simply untrue, and to suggest that there is money that has not been deployed that would otherwise have been spent is untrue. Everything the administration has wanted to spend, it has been able to spend.

Now, we hear a lot of talk about raiding funds. Let's talk about raiding funds. The administration took $500 million out of emergency response money--I believe in December or earlier this year--and redirected that to the global climate fund. That is money that was set aside that could have been used for Zika. Instead, it is in a global climate fund. The administration, in its own budget, took $40 million out of the Ebola fund and directed it into a worthy cause, malaria suppression. So we don't have objection, but the idea that this money isn't used is untrue.

Now, when we hear discussions about the Ebola money, that is money that was not to be spent in the next weeks or the next months, but in future years. We don't even know if it is enough or if it is too much. So the idea that using some of it now in an immediate emergency is wrong with the idea and the commitment that that would be replenished later, as needed, is the responsible thing to do.

As for NIH funding, in the Zika bill that this House passed, there are $230 million that fully funds the NIH's request for vaccination research for all of next year. So, again, the idea that money is not available and they don't know what to do if we pass this legislation is untrue.

So I would just suggest again we look at the real difference here. It has nothing to do with Zika response. It has everything to do with whether or not you want to pay for it when you have the money available or you just want to add another $1.9 billion to the national credit card.

It is thinking like that that got us into a situation where we were running $1.4 trillion deficits when my friends were in control on the other side. Where we still have a $450 billion, roughly, deficit for this fiscal year--and it will go up next year--we ought to be doing this in a prudent way.

Now, Zika response does not happen in a single day. It is something that will last, frankly, over multiple months and years. The administration's request for $1.9 billion is not for just today. It is for at least a period of 2 years.

So they have the money they need right now. The bill provides the next amount of money they need, and we will provide additional money in the course of the appropriations process.

I want to assure everybody that nothing will not be done because the money was not available. To date, the administration has been able to do everything it wanted to do. This debate that we are having here today is actually another step in that process.

This moves us toward conference. My friends probably look on the Senate bill with more favor than they do the House bill. Fair enough. We will go to conference with the Senate. So the process is underway. It is moving as it should.

When the administration asked for emergency funding, they immediately got a response from Chairman Rogers, saying: Spend whatever you need to spend right now. We will back you up. We have made good on that commitment. We are going to continue to make good on that commitment.

Mr. Speaker, there has been a great deal of discussion this morning about the Ebola fund and how it is being used and in what ways it is going to be used. Let me just go back and make a few points to clarify that situation.

When Congress acted, it appropriated almost $6 billion for Ebola. That money was to be spent over years. It wasn't really clear whether it was too much or, frankly, not enough. We simply didn't know.

Now, the reality is, even after the amounts of money that my friend has talked about that have been shifted from Ebola to deal with Zika, that fund still has over $1.7 billion in it, more than enough to finance all the planned activity not only for this fiscal year, but all of next fiscal year.

This is a multiyear fund. When you are in an emergency, it makes sense to take money like that and move it over, particularly with the assurance that that money will be replaced, as needed, in the regular appropriations process.

The administration itself is doing the same thing. In its own budget, it proposed taking money out of the Ebola fund and spending it on something else that it thought was more immediate. So the idea that this is somehow unprecedented or different than what the administration is doing is simply not true.

Now, the reality is--again, my friends seem to imply or perhaps believe that there is something that hasn't been done to date that the Federal Government wanted to do on Zika. That is not true.

They have had the funds to do everything they have wanted to do. They will continue to have the funds to do everything they want to do. So to suggest that somehow they are not being funded is just not the case.

Frankly, we have effectively in the Zika bill advance funded money for the NIH to actually begin research and have given them all the money in that bill they asked for for next fiscal year on the vaccine side of this.

So we will continue to work the process. We will continue to make sure that the resources are available to fight Zika because we all believe it is a danger. We will continue to do it in a responsible way by using the funds that are available, putting them on an immediate problem, and replenishing accounts as we need to.

Again, I remind my friends that that is something the administration itself has been doing not only with Ebola funds, but with other funds, when it has moved emergency response money to the global climate fund. I mean, goodness, that was $500 million that, had it been left there, would have been available right now for Zika for the response in other parts of the world.

So it is easy to get lost in the thicket of numbers here and this much from this pot and this much from that pot.

The reality is, number one, everything that the Federal Government has wanted to do to date they have had the money to do.

Number two, it has been paid for.

Number three, we are proposing to continue that, making sure they have all the funds that are needed, as needed, but we pay for them.

Number four, we are actually moving the process forward to sit down with the Senate by passing this rule and the underlying legislation and going to conference and actually hammering out a common bill that will be acceptable to all sides.

I appreciate the concern. I know it is genuine, quite frankly, but I also know that we are acting and acting effectively to deal with the problem.

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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time we have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by saying I also have a great deal of respect for the distinguished minority leader. She used in her remarks and made the point that the President had asked for a number of things.

Last year, the President asked for a billion dollars more for the NIH. We said: You know, we didn't think you asked for enough, so we are going to give you $2 billion.

Somehow, that seems to get lost.

Last year, the President sent down his request for the Centers for Disease Control. We said: You know, we don't think you are spending enough on public health, Mr. President. We are going to spend more money than you asked for.

This year, when the President submitted his budget, he decided: I am going to take a billion dollars of discretionary spending away from the National Institutes of Health and spend it someplace else.

We said: No, Mr. President; we think that is pretty reckless.

By the way, my Democratic friends agreed with that, too.

We said: We are not going to let you take a billion dollars of discretionary money away from the NIH and spend it someplace else. We are going to keep it right there. And, by the way, we are going to put more money than you asked for in this agency when the bill comes out, and we are probably going to do the same thing for the Centers for Disease Control.

So, to suggest that the President hasn't gotten what he has asked for is to, frankly, misstate the facts.

We have had a great deal of mention that the President has had the request for 94 days. What we have not had is one shred of evidence that, in those 94 days, he has not had the money to do every single thing he wanted to do. Indeed, the chairman of the committee urged him to start spending money immediately to do that. So there has been no loss of effort, and the bill in front of us now funds it for the rest of the fiscal year. It also funds the research on the vaccine at the NIH into next year.

So, again, I am just going to simply disagree with my friend that money has not been available. It has been available; and, frankly, to the appropriate agencies, more money has been available than the President has asked for. More money will be available next year than he asked for.

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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time remains?

Mr. Speaker, I want to reply to my very good friend from Maryland, whom I have not only great esteem for, but, frankly, great personal affection for, and I want to respond to his question. This is not a cover vote.

First of all, the main item here is actually veterans and military construction that is over $83 billion; that, through normal order, is moving forward. Now, to also move the Zika bill with it makes a lot of sense.

Frankly, one of the things in this bill--and I disagree with my friend's characterization--we want to make sure that misguided environmental regulations don't stop us from deploying pesticides that we may need. That is in this bill. That is pretty important to move forward.

The funding is also important. Now, my friends seem to forget, again, the long record here of who has been willing to support the NIH and who has been willing to support the CDC. We gave the NIH twice what the President asked for in additional new money last year. That is being spent right now, by the way. We also gave the Centers for Disease Control more money than the President asked for. This year, when the President tried to take $1 billion of discretionary money away from the NIH, both Republicans and Democrats on the Appropriations Committee said: No, Mr. President, we are not going to let you raid NIH and take money away and weaken the healthcare apparatus of the United States.

I made the point then--and I can assure my friends we will be happy to back it up--that we will put more money into NIH this year for next fiscal year than the President actually requests.

Now, in terms of Zika, the moment there was a crisis, the chairman of this committee, Hal Rogers, immediately sent a letter to the President and said: Spend all the money you need. There are whole pots of it in different spots. We will replace the dollars as they are needed.

So taking money out of funds that were meant to be spent over years and using them in immediate crises is not unusual. Indeed, the administration itself has done this twice in recent months: once taking $500 million from the Emergency Response Fund in the Department of State and spending it on climate change, instead of an emergency response; $40 million in their own budget out of Ebola money that they were going to spend on malaria money.

I don't condemn them for that, by the way. They just simply were using something and they said: This is an account that is going to take several years. We want to deal with malaria right now. Let's take some of that money. If we have got a problem later, we will fix it.

That is all that is going on here. At the end of the day, the amount of resources that are necessary will be made available. The only difference here is one side wants to pay for it and not add to the national debt. The other side really doesn't think that is a big consideration. That is a debate worth having. I don't mind having that debate.

But we heard the word ``reckless'' earlier. It is also shameless to exploit a crisis for political gain, and I think we are seeing some of that here today. Some of it is sincere, but some of it is great theatrics. It doesn't change the fact that when the President made his request, he has had every dime he has needed for that 94 days.

When my friends say the Republican bill only provides a third of the money, they somehow forget a third had already been provided. This is the second third. The rest of it will come. The money is to be spent as the administration requested, not over weeks or days, but over months and years. That is how they have proposed to deploy it. So giving them the money as they need it instead of writing them a blank check and not even paying for it ahead of time seems to us to be the prudent and responsible thing to do.

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Mr. COLE.

I want to respond quickly to some of my friend's points, Mr. Speaker, and I want to go back to the essential reality that we are facing.

Number 1, last year, when the President asked for $1 billion more for NIH, we said: That is not enough. We are going to give you two.

Last year the President submitted a request for CDC. We looked at it and said: You know, it is not enough. You evidently don't care enough about public health, Mr. President. We are going to spend more money.

This year he brought us a request to try and take $1 billion of discretionary funding away from NIH. My friends on the other side were as appalled as we were. We said: No, Mr. President, you are not going to take $1 billion out of NIH in a dangerous time of disease. We are not only going to keep that money there, we are going to put more money, additional money than you asked for.

We said the same thing about the CDC, and so we will do it.

In terms of what has been done, the minute the Zika virus appeared and the administration asked for emergency money, Hal Rogers, the chairman of the committee, responded and said: Spend whatever it takes.

And, indeed, the administration has done that.

My friends seem to suggest that there is something that hasn't been done, yet they never tell us what that one thing is.

The reality is the administration has had the money to do everything it has wanted to do. This bill provides more money on top of that. Our Senators are proposing even more, so we go to conference to figure out the appropriate amount and whether or not and to what degree it should be paid for. I would hope it is all paid for. It should be because we have the funds to do that.

So to suggest that there is some sort of failure of funding is simply not true, and my friends know it is not true. To suggest that we are not willing to put the money here would suggest that recent history has no relevance, because we have put more money here than the President asked us to put, and we have committed to put even more going forward.

The only difference here, and what drives my friends into a frenzy, is that we actually want to pay for this. They simply don't. They think, let's just put another $1.9 billion on the national credit card. This is a great excuse to do that.

Well, we are not prepared to do that, but we are prepared to respond to the legitimate needs of the American people and use the resources that we have.

So, Mr. Speaker, in closing, I agree with my colleagues on the other side. We should address the issue. We disagree with the other body on how to do it, and we will go on from there.

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to working with my colleagues in conference on these important issues.

The material previously referred to by Mr. McGovern is as follows: An amendment to H. Res. 751 Offered by Mr. McGovern

On page 2, line 4, insert ``as modified by the amendment specified in section 2 of this resolution'' before the semicolon.

At the end of the resolution, add the following new section:

Sec.2. The amendment referred to in section 1(a) is as follows: Strike divisions B and C and insert the text of H.R. 5044 as introduced. 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.
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