Motion to Instruct Conferees on H.R. Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to instruct at the desk.

Mr. Speaker, we have unfortunate circumstances. We do not have a bill that the majority has brought up for consideration, the Labor-HHS appropriations bill, as I believe it is our duty. I will remind everyone that this bill was twice delayed in the markup for Labor-HHS, so we are trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Meanwhile, the Senate has passed a Labor-HHS-Education bill. The Senate bill is not perfect. In fact, there is much to improve, but it provides a foundation for conference negotiations between the House and the Senate.

The House bill, unfortunately, despite an increase of $18 billion in nondefense spending, the House Labor-HHS-Education bill is held to level funding. Out of a total increase of $18 billion, the Labor-HHS- Education bill should receive an increase of about $5.5 billion, and yet we received a zero increase, and Chairman Cole has heard me say this over and over and over again.

This allocation means that the House bill includes no new investments in the Child Care and Development Block Grant, nor new funding to help students afford a postsecondary education. The House bill also eliminates funding for family planning and teen pregnancy prevention programs, as well as health and safety grants. It even cuts funding for community health centers by $100 million, and the list goes on.

In addition, the House Labor-HHS-Education bill is loaded with ideological poison pill riders, including riders to block funding for the Affordable Care Act, block funding for family planning, block funding for Planned Parenthood clinics, and it adds new riders to protect Monsanto and to allow religious discrimination in child welfare services.

However, there is one crucially important issue that is addressed in the House bill that must be included in the final conference report. That is the President's manufactured crisis at the border. I speak, of course, of family separation, which has inflicted terrible trauma on children, their parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, and uncles.

The administration's policy of separating families is child abuse. Experts have sounded the alarm on the lasting damage that we are doing to these children. Parents are the buffer. With them, the children can endure incredibly stressful circumstances. Without them, the children are at risk of lasting mental and physical damage, and they are suffering these wounds at our hands.

Now, months and months later, approximately 500 children who were separated from their families remain in HHS custody. For most of these children, their parents were deported, and HHS has been unable to reunify these families, and unfathomably, may never be able to reunify them.

The administration has tried to pass off responsibility of reunifying these families to third parties like nonprofits. It is unconscionable. In the House bill, Democrats advanced the first congressional action to address this manufactured crisis. The full committee, I might add, on a bipartisan basis, adopted 12 amendments. These amendments must be retained in the final conference report.

These amendments, to discuss them very briefly, did a number of things. They expressed the sense of Congress that families should not be separated and that families should be reunited immediately. They required HHS to provide Congress a plan for swift reunification, to provide regular reporting, and to ensure the agency and its partners are upholding the highest standards with regards to care and privacy.

Family separation is not the only crucial element of the conference committees. Student safety must also be paramount, and thus, it is also important to address the issue of guns in our schools.

Arming teachers is not the answer to school shootings, and it is outrageous that Secretary DeVos would even consider using taxpayer dollars on such a dangerous proposal.

If the Trump administration actually wants to keep students safe, it should allow the Federal Commission on School Safety to consider the role guns play in school violence, support funding for gun violence prevention research at the CDC, and fully fund the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Program to provide more mental health services and bullying prevention programs in our schools.

The Secretary has said she has no intention of weighing in on whether funds can be used or cannot be used to arm teachers. However, she should say that this money is not there for guns in the classrooms.

In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, we must make the best of a bad situation. Republicans are not operating under regular order and abdicating our responsibility as the House of Representatives. Yet, as we proceed, we need to ensure that we advance the best policy under the circumstances. I believe that we should have had the House Labor-HHS bill come before the floor of the House.

I urge my colleagues on the conference committee to keep these priorities in mind as they work toward a final bill. The American people deserve nothing less. They are already getting too little. Let us not forget that our obligation and duty is to give people a better chance at a better life.

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Ms. DeLAURO. It is my understanding, Mr. Speaker, that the gentleman needs to yield back, and then I close.

In closing, let me again urge the House conferees to look at the Senate Labor-HHS bill as a base for improvement, and I mean seriously to improve it.

I ask them again to please pay close attention to the priorities that we have outlined here today. The work of the Labor-HHS bill has always reflected our priorities as a Nation, helping to provide services that meet our most basic needs, our health, our children's education, and the scientific research that uncovers the cures of tomorrow. These are challenges that only the Federal Government has the ability, the capacity, and the resources to help us meet.

The central problem of the House bill is that it fails to meet that threshold. The American people are tired of Congress spending trillions in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while telling families and working people that we simply do not have the resources to invest in things that impact their daily lives. We can make those investments, but only if we make them a priority.

I want to say to the chairman of the subcommittee, to Mr. Cole, that we have been able to bargain in good faith over the last several years, and that ought to be our goal in this effort, so that we can meet the mission of what this Labor-HHS bill has at its core. It is about the people of this country and meeting their needs.

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Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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