Providing for Consideration of the Senate Amendment to the Bill H.R. 5325, Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2017

Floor Speech

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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, earlier today, the Rules Committee met and reported a rule for consideration of the Senate amendment to H.R. 5325, the Continuing Appropriations and Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2017, and Zika Response and Preparedness Act.

The rule makes in order a motion offered by the chair of the Committee on Appropriations that the House concur in the Senate amendment to H.R. 5325, with 60 minutes equally divided and controlled by the chair and the ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations.

Mr. Speaker, as a member of the Appropriations Committee, I am always disappointed when we are forced to consider continuing resolutions, especially given the work this House has done in the appropriations process this fiscal year.

For 2 years in a row, the House Appropriations Committee was able to complete all 12 appropriations bills--and complete them before the August recess. In addition, this House passed five appropriations bills.

Unfortunately, just as in years past, Senate Democrats prevented consideration of many appropriations bills on the floor of that body.

This leads us to the unfortunate situation of having to put forward a short-term CR to fund the government through December 9.

I hope that in the weeks and months ahead, the House, Senate, and the President can come to an agreement on a path forward which ensures we are not in this same position in December.

At the same time, I am pleased that this amendment also includes a fully conferenced MILCON-VA bill. The MILCON-VA portion provides a 4 percent increase for the VA, additional resources to address the disability claims backlog, and contains a number of important oversight provisions to make certain our veterans receive the care that they deserve.

The military construction portion provides $7.9 billion for military family housing, Guard and Reserve facilities, and military bases both in the United States and around the world. This ensures that we can sustain quality housing for 1.3 million military families.

In addition, the MILCON-VA bill maintains a provision which prohibits the closure of Guantanamo Bay and the construction of any facilities to house detainees in the United States or its territories.

Importantly, Mr. Speaker, this amendment also provides a total of $1.1 billion to fight Zika and offsets $400 million of this spending.

While I would have preferred offsetting the entire amount--and have supported legislation to do just that--I believe this is a reasonable compromise with both the Senate and the administration, both of whom initially proposed no offsets at all.

When combined with funds already preprogramed by the administration for Zika response activities, the total available resources to respond to Zika equals $1.7 billion. This legislation provides the necessary funds for the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the State Department, and USAID to develop vaccines and diagnostic tests for mosquito control and, in addition, provides healthcare resources to those areas experiencing the highest rates of Zika transmission, all while maintaining the Hyde amendment restrictions barring the use of taxpayer dollars for abortion services.

I am encouraged by the hard work of Chairman Rogers, Ranking Member Lowey, and, of course, the Speaker, whose leadership has made all of this possible. While a CR is not the ideal vehicle, the alternative of a government shutdown is not what we have been sent here to Washington to do.

Additionally, I am encouraged that we are finally returning to regular order and passing full-year appropriations measures by the end of the fiscal year. This is the first time since fiscal year 2006, when we passed two bills by the end of the fiscal year, that we have passed any individual appropriations bills through both Chambers of the United States Congress by the September 30 deadline. While we have a long way to go, this is a good first step that we can hopefully build upon next year.

I urge support for the rule and the underlying legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by congratulating my friend and thanking her. I know she is committed to the resumption of regular order, and she has worked that way tirelessly. That is a goal that we share with our friends on the other side of the aisle.

I think it is worth pointing out that you can't have regular order in the House if you don't have regular order in the Senate. The real reason we are here is because the Senate has refused consistently to take up appropriations bills that have been passed by this House.

At some point, you simply quit passing the bills because the Senate isn't going to deal with you. Once we finally have a Senate that will work in regular order--and I hope we do at the beginning of next January--perhaps we can overcome this and get back to the system that I know my friend from New York and I want to see on this floor: passing each individual appropriations bill, doing so in a way that Members can participate, conferences with our friends in the Senate, and then moving forward.

As to Zika, I think it is worth pointing out that nothing has not been done for lack of money. The reality is, when the administration made its initial request for Zika funds, they immediately received a letter from Chairman Rogers, from Subcommittee Chairman Granger on State-Foreign Operations, and from myself, saying: Look, we know this is an emergency. We agree with you. You have billions of dollars of funds. Start spending that money--a bowl of money, so-called--and we will replace that money.

Frankly, they have done that, to their credit. They set aside $600 million, not all of which has been spent, but that was the responsible thing to do, as Congress studied and look at this problem.

Chairman Rogers actually led a codel that went to Brazil, Peru, and some of the areas that have suffered from this disease, and we have continued to work. We have twice put on this floor hundreds of millions of dollars for Zika response that our friends on the other side didn't see fit to vote for.

Zika didn't get funded because, frankly, our friends just simply didn't want to pay for it. That has actually been the essence of the dispute, in my opinion. It has not been about Zika. It has been about whether or not you pay for Zika.

The original request from the administration was for $1.9 billion over a 2-year period to come out of State-Foreign Operations and Labor- HHS, two committees that, in that same period, have $425 billion to spend. It is not hard to pay for $1.9 billion out of $425 billion.

Still, at the end of the day, my friend is absolutely correct: we are here. We have not failed to do anything, but we do need to provide a framework to go forward with guaranteed continuity. I am pleased and proud this does that. Frankly, we reserve the option next fiscal year to look at actually covering other parts of the unfunded spending on Zika.

In terms of the Export-Import Bank, I am going to agree with my friend. I don't know that this was the appropriate vehicle, but I think the point she makes is exactly right. We need to restore this particular institution to full functioning. That has been a matter of some partisan debate, but, actually, I agree with my friends. I support the Export-Import Bank, and I think we need to re-establish it. And if we could have done it in this bill, that would have been fine with me.

But I trust the people that negotiated the final product, and they did try to remove a lot of issues that were controversial and divisive so that, hopefully, we could get a substantial majority of both parties to vote for continuing the government.

I want to end by saying that, again, I want to invite our friends in the Senate to participate in regular order. In some ways they have done that. I want to give them credit for last year and this year passing all 12 appropriations bills at least through the full committee level.

But it was a decision by their leadership not to allow those bills to come to the floor that actually gummed up the works. It is not anything that was done in the House. Indeed, we didn't give up on that process until it became abundantly clear that the Senate wasn't going to move.

We are now, however, at the last moment. My friend is correct in that. I am pleased that we have negotiated together in good faith, frankly, within this body, across the rotunda with the other body, and with the administration, to arrive at something that will get us through the election and give us the time when we return from the election to sit down.

In that period of time, I want to commit to my friend that I will be looking forward to working with her and her colleagues to make sure we fully finish the appropriations process.

There are some in this body that don't want to do that. They want to simply CR or do a continuing resolution to some point in the future next year, dumping off the work of this Congress and this administration on the next administration and the next Congress. That would be a big mistake, in my opinion.

I know my friend feels exactly the same way, so I commit to her, I will do everything I can on my side of the aisle--I know she will on her side--to make sure that we continue the full appropriations process, and we make sure fiscal year 2017 is funded.

The new administration, when it shows up, is going to have a lot to do, whoever that person is. They are going to have to advance their agenda. They are going to have to name the Cabinet members. They are going to have to get them confirmed. They are going to have to write a budget for FY18 by the middle of February. We will have a debt ceiling crisis in March, and we will have, frankly, the sequester to deal with which, like Halley's Comet, will return on schedule on time. That is plenty for a new President and a new Congress to do.

I would hope we do our job in the so-called lameduck session and make sure that they don't have the additional task of picking up and doing the work that this Congress and this President should have done on their own. So my friend is right on that point.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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