Providing for Consideration of Motions to Suspend the Rules
PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF MOTIONS TO SUSPEND THE RULES -- (House of Representatives - December 18, 2005)
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I do not object to this rule that will allow for the consideration of a number of suspension bills, and I expect that these bills, all of them, will be approved if not unanimously certainly overwhelmingly by this House.
As we gather here today, the Sunday before Christmas and Chanukah, it is the process and the way the Republican leadership are running this House that I strongly object to. These last few days, in fact the entire year, I think is a great example of how not to run a government.
Sometime today we expect to consider and vote on the Defense appropriations bill. No one will have time to read and examine the final product. We will not know what last-minute goodies are tucked into the bill. Mr. Speaker, we read news reports that drilling in the Arctic will be in the bill, but we do not know if ANWR is included because we have not yet seen it. And what drilling in Alaska's wilderness has to do with the Pentagon is beyond my comprehension, but there are some in the Republican leadership who do not care about the regular process and want to tuck this in the Defense bill because they know it cannot be enacted on its own.
We also do not know exactly what else is attached to the Defense appropriations bill. Is there funding for Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma? And if so, what are the details? Will there be funding for the prevention of a possible avian flu pandemic? Are there campaign finance reform provisions included in any of these bills? And if so, who approved them?
And then there is the Defense authorization bill, which has been held up for much time because the White House did not want language in it that banned torture. This is the United States of America, Mr. Speaker. If we stand for anything, it is out loud and foursquare for human rights. And torture is something that we, as a civilized society and as a decent people, should reject.
Now, the President, from news reports, has apparently now accepted the language by Senator McCain which would ban torture, which is a good thing. But some suspect that it is only because the Justice Department has assured him that he can get around the language banning torture, and that is a bad thing. But despite the apparent capitulation of the White House on the issue of torture, we still do not have a Defense authorization bill, and nobody can tell us why.
We are also told a budget reconciliation bill will come up today. Does anyone have a clue what will be in that bill? This is a bill that will impact all of our citizens and could potentially have an adverse impact on the most vulnerable of our citizens.
Mr. Speaker, whether you are a liberal, a conservative, or whether you want more government or less, I think most of us would agree that whatever government we have must be competent and responsive to the people. Now, the Republicans control all of government. They control the House of Representatives, they control the Senate, and they control the White House. It is clear that they are unable to be effective stewards of our government.
Now, putting aside the corruption scandals that hang like a dark cloud over the Congress and the White House, what we see is an inability to govern. When Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast, the Federal Government responded miserably. The President put a political appointee in charge of FEMA who was incompetent. The President took responsibility, but ultimately the incompetence and cronyism of his administration led to a disaster that included the loss of many lives.
On the war in Iraq: no weapons of mass destruction, no ties between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda, and no imminent threat to the security of the United States of America; yet we rushed into war. Whether the intelligence was manipulated or not, clearly this government did not do its job. It failed, and over 2,100 Americans are now dead.
But now we are in Iraq, Mr. Speaker. We were there with no post-invasion plan, we are there with no-bid contracts that have led to massive corruption and fraud, our soldiers lack the most basic protective equipment, and with a chain of command that resulted in grave abuses of human rights by some of our own uniformed men and women and some of our Iraqi allies. Ultimately, the President again took responsibility. But, Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, I am tired of the speeches. I, like so many others, want genuine reform and change. I want accountability.
This all brings me to this Congress. There is a reason why this Congress has only a 25 percent approval rating. It is because you are doing a lousy job. You are trashing the rules and regular order. The selling of legislation to the highest bidder, the hard-ball tactics against your own Members to win votes, your lack of oversight and demand for accountability from this administration, all that and more is catching up to you. People are watching. People do care. They believe that you cannot competently run this government, and they want the government back.
The mess that we have before us cannot be blamed on Democrats. After all, as I have said, Republicans control everything. You cannot blame this on Bill Clinton, even though some of you try, because he has been gone now for a full 5 years. This is your fault. The battles going on behind closed doors are between your right wing and your far right wing. For those of us in the minority, and many on your side who want good government, this is a frustrating period.
Mr. Speaker, nobody denies that leadership of Congress is a hard task, but either you live up to the responsibilities or you acknowledge it is time for a change. After this sorry year, it is time for a change
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, before I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich), I just want to say a couple of things.
First of all, we are here 3 weeks after the Republican majority said we were to adjourn, in part because they have not done a very good job of getting our business done.
Secondly, we can argue about priorities and we can argue about policies, and that is all fine and good; but one of the issues that I raised is the issue of competence. When we have disasters in this country, like Hurricane Katrina, the response of the Federal Government was miserable. It demonstrated a stunning incompetence that I am not sure has been fixed yet. People are still not getting response from the Federal Government in the Gulf States that they, quite frankly, deserve.
Thirdly, in terms of debate and how legislation is brought to the floor, I think that is another failure of this Congress. We do have debates in the Rules Committee, sometimes at weird hours, where not a lot of people get to hear them. But routinely, on major pieces of legislation, they are brought to the floor with very little advanced notice. Oftentimes, people do not have a chance to review what is in the legislation.
That is going to happen today with the Defense appropriations bill. No one will have an opportunity to review it. We will find out in a week or 2 weeks from now, because some Washington Post reporter or New York Times reporter or L.A. Times reporter will dig into it and find all these little goodies that none of us have a chance to know about in advance. That is not the way things should be done.
The Rules Committee, for example, routinely shuts us out of offering amendments to important pieces of legislation. We had a controversial resolution on Iraq that was on the floor the other day, and yet an alternative that was proposed by the ranking member of the International Relations Committee was deemed out of order. We had a pension reform bill that some of us had issues with, and we were denied a substitute.
On major bills that matter, we are shut out; and we are oftentimes not allowed the opportunity to try to get our points of view across on the House floor. And I would say that I think the American people are starting to catch on to that, and they do not like that form of government. This is supposed to be a deliberative body where important issues get debated.
Again, I have no problem with the suspensions that are being brought up here today. But in comparison to some of the issues that are facing this country, from poverty to the war in Iraq, to health insurance and the high price of gas, what we are talking about now is killing time with some relatively trivial matters. There are more important issues before us.
The deficit. You have accumulated the biggest deficit in the history of the United States of America as a result of your policies. That is not a success story, in my opinion. Again, we can differ on policies, but let us approach this legislation in a responsible way, and that means giving all sides, including people on your side, who have differences of opinion the opportunity to be able to debate these things fully on the House floor.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, let me end as I began here with a plea that we strive for a better process. This is not the way we should be running our government, bringing bills to the floor at the last minute without having given people the opportunity to read what is in them. We should have learned last year. When the Republican majority brought a bill to the floor, we had to meet again and fix it because someone snuck a provision in there that would allow certain Members of the Congress and their staffs to be able to review people's IRS records. We went back and quickly fixed that after it became public that it was in the bill.
We can do so much better than what we see going on right here at this present time. I think this more than anything else is one of the reasons why I think we need a change of leadership in the Congress. I think there needs to be checks and balances. There aren't checks and balances right now. There needs to be oversight, there needs to be accountability.
We need to do the people's business in a more deliberative way. We have to move away from this pattern of locking people out of opportunities to be able to participate in debates and offer their amendments.
Mr. Speaker, having said all of that, we have no objection to this rule that will allow for filler between now and the time that some of these important conference reports come to the floor.
I will close with this. I think every one of our colleagues needs to know that you are not going to know what is in any of these bills that are coming to the floor. You will find out in the newspapers. That is not the way this government should run.
Having said that, we have no problem with the rule.
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