Providing for Consideration of the Senate Amendment to H.R. 2028, Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. COLE. I thank my good friend for being so generous in yielding me the time.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of both the rule and the underlying legislation.

I begin by sharing my friend from Georgia's enthusiasm for the WRDA bill. I think this was an absolutely masterful piece of work by three chairmen. Obviously, primarily, Chairman Shuster is the architect; but I was also working with him on several important Indian issues and with Chairman Bishop from the Committee on Natural Resources and, on the Flint issue in particular, with Chairman Upton from Energy and Commerce.

I share my friend's belief that these projects have been worked through in a bipartisan way. Many, many good things, literally, in every part of the country will take place, and our friends on the other side of the aisle were very cooperative in that as well. This is usually a bipartisan effort. It certainly was in this case.

I am very pleased about Flint. There was, frankly, failure at every level of government--Federal, State, and local. I am glad that the Congress is following up on the commitment of the Speaker and of our good friend from Michigan (Mr. Kildee), who has been the leader, obviously, in this and is doing the right thing there.

Again, the water projects, themselves, touch almost every district in the country--certainly, every State in the country.

I want to particularly point out the Indian provisions in here, which often get overlooked. We did some really important things in working with Mr. Bishop and Mr. Shuster in common. We settled a number of really important individual Indian water case issues. I think the Pechanga case, for instance, which I know my friend the Speaker is familiar with, has been around for many years. We also changed the definitions in law so Indian tribes can now compete for water projects and water funding, particularly in some of the areas.

Again, my friend the Speaker has seen some of these shortages in infrastructure as we traveled to reservations around the country together; so putting these people in a position to make sure they have access to funds to deal with water is important.

Finally, for my own State--extremely important--and at no cost to the Federal Government, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the city of Oklahoma City, and the State of Oklahoma negotiated a water settlement arrangement inside of Oklahoma for the appropriate distribution of water. That requires Federal approval because there is a trust responsibility. We got the deal done, frankly, relatively late this year. We got tremendous cooperation in Congress and in the Senate.

Certainly, Jim Inhofe played a big role over there by getting it in the bill in order to get that memorialized and done in an expeditious fashion. We are very grateful for that.

When it comes to the CR, I certainly support the CR, and I certainly appreciate very much the work that Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Lowey did to adjust, as much as possible, this short-term funding measure to try and deal with what we call around here ``anomalies'' and try to get the money to where it is supposed to go. There are many good things, again, in this short-term funding bill through April 28, my birthday, so perhaps this will work out in the end. Of course, it is also Saddam Hussein's birthday, so that doesn't always work out too well.

At the end of the day, we ought to look at this process. I find myself in agreement with my good friend from New York on many of the things that she had to say. We should be negotiating an omnibus bill.

We have the time to do it. We were told, when we passed the short-term CR in late September, that that is what we would do in this timeframe.

I can assure you, because they did it last year, that Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Lowey could do it again this year. We are pretty close on all of these issues. It is a mistake, in my view, to push this into next year. Next year, we will have to write the FY18 budget and do the appropriations while we are simultaneously doing this, and the temptation will be very great to just do another CR and pass this on.

While all of this seems like budget double-talk to the average American, the reality is we have passed a lot of good legislation this year, but the funding isn't matched up with the legislation that we have passed. That is because we are relying on a continuing resolution as opposed to doing the real hard work of appropriations.

Last year, when we did that, by the way, it provided us budget stability this year. It got us out of a lot of the fights--and guess what. All of a sudden, you end up with cures. All of a sudden, you end up with WRDA.
All of a sudden, you get a national defense authorization done, because we have done the appropriate things.
The Appropriations Committee, I am quick to add, has done its work.

All 12 bills that fund the Federal Government passed out of Appropriations--5 of them across this floor. I believe, with some of the most contentious, like Interior, our problem partly is our friends in the Senate who blocked up the deal, but we could have still finished an omnibus bill this year.

I support this. I don't think we made a wise decision in the manner in which we are proceeding, but, certainly, we don't want to shut down the government. I just want to serve notice to my friends who made the decision that I am going to hold their feet to the fire so that, in April, we actually do what we said we were going to do and that we go back to regular order.

Mr. Speaker, I urge the passage of the rule and the underlying legislation.

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