Department of the Interior, Environment, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Chair, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.
Initially, I want to say that I hope that very soon, in a bipartisan way, we will bring a DACA bill to this floor.
Let me quote what President Trump said last night. Trump tweeted that he wanted to ``legalize DACA,'' another call to action, and further muddled where the administration stood and what it would do.

He said: We need to come together and do this, and we really have no choice. Now, I want to speak about this bill. As the chairman knows, and as the ranking member knows, I served on the Appropriations Committee for 23 years, so I have taken leave of absence because I am one of the leaders on our side of the aisle.

For most of those years, we worked in a bipartisan fashion. This is a partisan bill. It is sad, and it is not regular order at all. Regular order is doing one bill after another until you have passed the 12 bills. In fact, I don't think I have ever seen this process done in this fashion.

When I was the majority leader, the first year we passed all 12 bills individually, discretely, separately, and sent them to the Senate before the August break.

Hal Rogers, the former chairman of this committee, said of the President's budget: ``While we have a responsibility to reduce our Federal deficit, I am disappointed that many of the reductions and eliminations proposed in the President's skinny budget are draconian, careless and counterproductive.'' I think the same could be applied to the budget that is before us.

The omnibus appropriations package the House is considering this week is, as all of us here recognize--all of us recognize--the chairman, I have great respect for, and I am not going to ask him publicly whether he thinks the Senate is going to adopt any one of these bills, but I know his answer.

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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Chair, let me say to my colleagues, this is not the way to do it. John McCain gave a compelling speech on the floor of the United States Senate as he was challenged with a brain tumor and thinking deeply about what we ought to do. And he said: We need to act together. We need to be bipartisan. We need to do the people's work in a way they expect us to do it: together.

Mr. Chairman, this bill is not going to get a Democratic vote. That is sad. It is sad for the House; it is sad for the country; and it is sad for the people who will be shortchanged by this bill.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no,'' and I urge the majority party to return to the table, as surely we will, to work in a bipartisan fashion to construct bills that we can all be proud of.

There will be compromises. We won't get all that we want, but they will be bills that the American people can be proud of and that this House can be proud of. Let us return to the bipartisan comity and respect for one another that so long prevailed in the Appropriations Committee. How sad we have fallen to this place.

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