Providing for Consideration of H.R. Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, Providing for Consideration of H.R. Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, Providing for Consideration of H.R. Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, Providing for Consideration of H.R. Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, and Waiving A Requirement of Clause Reported From the Committee on Rules

Floor Speech

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Mr. COLE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my good friend, Chairman McGovern, for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, we are back again on appropriations, and we are back again on the exact same set of bills as before.

Last week, the House agreed, over Republican objections, to pass a set of appropriations bills, six of which would fund the relevant departments for a full year, the seventh of which would fund the Department of Homeland Security until February 8.

Today, not content with already having passed these bills once, my friends in the majority are again bringing up four individual bills that were part of the same package covering the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development bill, Financial Services and general government bill, the Agriculture bill, and the Interior and Environment bill. Nothing substantive in these bills has changed. Indeed, nothing substantive has yet changed anywhere in this process:

The government remains partially shut down;

The Senate is refusing to pass the bills my Democratic Party colleagues are proposing;

The President is refusing to sign them; and

The majority is proposing to fix the problem by passing the exact same bills.

To quote the great Yogi Bera: ``It is deja vu all over again.''

While I commend my friends in the majority for trying to reopen the government, let's be clear about what they are proposing. The four bills under consideration here represent only the Senate-passed versions of the bills covering the fiscal year 2019 appropriations process. They represent no input at all from the House, no input at all from the Appropriations Committee, and no input at all from the joint House and Senate conference committees that were appointed to iron out the differences between these bills and their House counterparts.

In essence, the Democrats' only plan is for the House to swallow the Senate's original bills, abrogate our authority and responsibility as a coequal House of Congress, and declare victory. What is more surprising is that my friends now expect that having tried this same thing before, they will now get a different result.

To be clear, last week, when the House passed these exact same bills, the Senate made it known these bills would not come to the floor; and even if they did, the President has made it known that he would not sign them. I don't know what they think is so different about this week over last to make my friends think that all they need to do is to pass them again and, magically, the Senate will pass these bills and the President will sign them.

Perhaps even more surprising, the majority now wishes to bring these four bills forward under a closed rule, with no opportunity for the House to amend them and no opportunity for Members to weigh in. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I understand how hard it is to have a full process on appropriations bills. But it is, indeed, possible, even when funding bills carry over into a new year or even a new majority.

In 2011, right after Republicans took majority control of the House, we considered a bill on the floor to fund the entire Federal Government. We did it under an open rule, with only a preprinting requirement. When we considered that bill on the floor, 162 amendments were offered from both sides of the aisle, and we had a grand total of 66 hours of floor debate on the bill, stretching out over 5 days.

Given the amount of time we used in 2011, I fully understand what an undertaking that would be. But unless the majority believes that these bills will quickly pass the Senate and quickly be signed by the President into law, then there is plenty of time for thoughtful debate and plenty of time to hear ideas from all Members of this House. Instead, the majority has chosen to push forward with an appropriations strategy that they know cannot succeed.

Mr. Speaker, the House should be taking steps this week to negotiate with the Senate and the President to end this shutdown. That means that, whether the majority likes it or not, they need to engage on border security.

The American people have told us time and time again that they want action on border security. The solution they are proposing today does nothing on that front.

Even if we pass these bills today, and even if they, ultimately, became law, the border would remain unsecured and the Department of Homeland Security would remain shut down. Nothing the House will do in this package will change that essential fact, and nothing in this package is a step on the road to changing that essential fact.

Mr. Speaker, it wasn't always this way. In 2006, 64 Democrats joined Republicans in passing the Secure Fence Act, which President Bush signed into law. Those 64 Democrats then included 13 current Members now and one additional Member who has since gone on to the Senate. Even liberal lions of the House, like our good friend and former colleague Congressman Barney Frank, joined the Republicans in voting for border security. I am unclear what has changed, from then until now, that would cause the entire majority Caucus to refuse to work with Republicans on border security when so many did so back in 2006.

In closing, Mr. Speaker, while I agree with the good intentions of the majority in seeking to fund the government, their method of doing so is in no way sufficient. Instead of abrogating our own authority, embracing a Senate-only product that the President will not sign, and kicking the can down the road, we should be taking concrete steps to reopen the government, secure the border, and move on to the many important needs of the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I want to disagree a little bit with my friend's memory on what the last Congress did and did not do. Quite frankly, it was the most successful Congress in enacting appropriations bills in 22 years, 75 percent of them across the floor on time. We will see how good the record is as my friends are in the majority. And I am going to work with my friends on that, because I know it is the intention to do that, but it is no easy task.

To say that the last Congress didn't act when, in fact, it put a bill over in the United States Senate that the President would have signed is simply untrue. To suggest that Republicans controlled the Senate in this process, when a Democratic minority in the Senate kept us from getting to 60 votes, there is where your real obstruction was. Quite frankly, this problem would have never happened if the Senate chose to operate the way we do, by simple majority vote, and the President would have had a bill.

One last point, if I may. The President did offer to negotiate. The reports in the media are that he actually offered to reduce his request by half. That is normally, around here, considered a real negotiation: Let's split the difference and find the common ground.

My friends didn't choose to take up that offer. So the idea that they have somehow been innocent bystanders when they were in the minority, in a process out of control, simply misstates reality.

Mr. Speaker, I will be happy to take up the challenge. I would be happy to meet with anybody to reopen the government. I would be happy if we had a product in front of us, which we did have in late December that had actually been agreed to by the United States Senate.

Why my friends chose to just simply take the Senate bills--which I will assure you, are not nearly as good as the conference bills between the two bodies--and throw all of the work out that this body did over a year, the appropriators, and the rest of the authorizing committees that play a supplemental role in this, I will never know.

It would have been a lot harder to vote ``no'' than just simply sit here and strip 435 Members of their ability to legislate, which is effectively what my friends in the majority have chosen to do.

I hope going forward we can do exactly what my friend suggests. I would also suggest that the people he mentioned go meet with the President of the United States. He was here all December, happy to negotiate with anybody. He wasn't in Hawaii. He was here. He offered to split the difference. That was an unacceptable offer to my friends.

So if you want to negotiate, negotiate with the President. If you want to do something with the Senate, I would expect that you should probably sit down and talk to them because you are sending them something this week that you sent last week, that they didn't take up then, and they are not going to take up now.

So whenever we want to negotiate, I would be thrilled to be at the table, but I haven't seen any evidence that my friends do want to negotiate. Instead, they simply want to dictate. They simply want to dictate the outcome and achieve what they think is a political victory, and that is coming at the expense of the American people. Real negotiations mean sitting down and settling differences. It doesn't mean shooting paper back and forth across the rotunda.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to notify the body, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to report modified open rules for each bill before us today: H.R. 264, H.R. 265, H.R. 266, and H.R. 267. The rule would include a preprinting requirement.

Mr. Speaker, the bills before us today are simply nothing more than Senate products. House Democrats would rather try to win political points against the Senate than allow this House to do its job. Again, the Senate hasn't indicated they will take up these measures, and the President has not agreed to sign these measures. There is time to do this the right way.

In 2011, right after Republicans took the majority control of the House, the government was operating under a continuing resolution, and we considered a bill on the floor to fund the entire Federal Government, and we did it under one open rule with just a preprinting requirement.

There were a total of 66 hours of floor debate from the afternoon of February 15, 2011, to the early hours of February 19, including one stretch of debate that lasted 42 hours.

I do understand what an enormous undertaking it would be, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't and can't take the time.

Mr. Speaker, I was amused--and I actually mean this in very good spirit--when my friend mentioned how frequently he had been quoted in today's debate, and I have to say I consider my friend one of the great debaters in this Chamber, and I enjoy hearing him quoted on the floor of the House. So I accept that, and I hope the gentleman knows it was a compliment to him in many ways.

I also want to tell him--and I mean this very seriously--I take him at his word. I don't have any doubt my friend wants to operate differently than we have operated in the past and that he wants this institution to be more open to inclusion of various points of view and very sincere debate, and I pledge to my friend I will work with him in that endeavor.

Now, it is hard to resist pointing out the gentleman's first six bills have all been under closed rules. I suspect we will continue to point that out until we have an opportunity to say to my good friend-- and I think we will in the very near future--``Congratulations, you are following through on the things that you said.'' Again, I know my friend will do that at what he considers and the majority considers the appropriate time.

We have a lot of discussion, Mr. Speaker, about who did and didn't do their jobs in the last Congress. I would tell you, in my view, that the House did its job. It passed its bills. It sent to the Senate a product that the President would sign.

Mr. Speaker, I would tell you, you are doing your job here, as well, right now in the majority. You passed bills last week. You sent them over to the United States Senate.

In our case, the minority in the Senate blocked consideration of our bills. Had those bills been placed on the floor, we wouldn't be here today. They would have all passed. They had majority support in the Senate; they had a President willing to sign them; and they had already passed the House.

The only reason why we are here today is because the Democratic minority in the Senate manipulated the rules of the Senate in such a way that they could stop action. I suspect we all have had frustration with that as House Members in the past. I think we will again in the future.

I also want to reflect with my friends, and I draw this conclusion not so much out of their actions, but actions that my own party, from time to time, has committed, and I suspect I will say this to this Chamber many times: Pursuit of absolute victory in domestic political disputes is always a mistake. It always leaves a divided country and an embittered opponent, and you will rue the day when you pursue it. We have certainly done that, Mr. Speaker, on my side of the aisle.

I think that, to some degree, though, is what is going on today. Sooner or later--and we are going to live with a Republican Senate for the next 2 years and a Republican President for the next 2 years--my friends in the majority will have to decide whether they want to govern or debate, because that is all we are doing now.

Mr. Speaker, you are not the opposition party anymore. You are the majority party, and you have every right to pursue your agenda. But if you really want to govern, if you really want to get something done, in the end, you are going to have to work with the Republican Senate, and you are going to have to work with the Republican President.

We learned that hard reality when we were in the majority but dealing with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President in 2011 through 2014. I hope my friends learn the lesson more quickly and become wiser than we were. I hope they benefit from our experience.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, I urge opposition to this rule and the underlying measure. The majority today is putting forward a closed rule to bring up four appropriations bills, each of which the House has already passed last week.

But, unfortunately, each of these bills is not a product of the House of Representatives. These bills are Senate products that do not reflect any House input. What is worse, they do not solve the fundamental problem of border security, and they do not represent a serious effort to reopen the government.

Since the Senate will not pass these bills and the President will not sign them, all we are accomplishing here today is spinning our wheels. The majority would be better served to undertake serious negotiations with the President and the Senate over the need for border security and to find a way out of the crisis of their own making rather than hoping that something will be different this time.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``no'' on the previous question, ``no'' on the underlying measure, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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