Providing for Consideration of H.R. Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Agriculture, Rural Development, Energy and Water Development, Financial Services and General Government, Interior, Environment, Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Act, and for Other Purposes
Floor Speech
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), the distinguished chairman of the Rules Committee, and my good friend, for yielding me the customary 30 minutes.
Madam Speaker, today's rule covers H.R. 4502, a seven-bill appropriations package for fiscal year 2022, including the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, where I am the ranking member.
Though I have great affection for my good friend, Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro, and respect all of my colleagues across the aisle, I think this package is deeply misguided, and I will be opposing it today.
From the beginning, this package was structured on a flawed premise. The majority chose to use the 302(b) allocation numbers, the levels that tell each subcommittee how much money they can spend, that were totally off the mark.
The majority chose to mark their bills to spending levels that called for a 17 percent increase in nondefense spending, and an inadequate 1 percent increase in defense spending, less even than the amount the President requested in his own budget.
At a time when our national security is facing repeated threats, ranging from the Middle East to Afghanistan to the South China Sea, we can hardly afford to return to the continual underfunding of our military that was the hallmark of the Obama-Biden years.
What is worse, these seven bills account for a 21 percent increase over fiscal year 2021. Across the seven titles, the majority is asking to spend more than $100 billion more in fiscal year 2022 than we did just last year. This comes on top of massive spending earlier this year with the majority's $1.9 trillion COVID spending package, and at a time when Democrats in the House and the Senate are looking to spend another $3.5 trillion as part of a new partisan reconciliation bill. This is truly tax-and-spend politics like we have never seen before.
But the problems with this bill aren't just with the amount of money that they spend. In drafting this package, the majority has also chosen to strip out longstanding bipartisan policy provisions and, instead, has filled this package with partisan, far-left policy that simply cannot pass both Chambers and become law.
There is no better illustration of this than the majority's shocking decision to remove the Hyde and Weldon amendments.
For 45 years, through both Democratic and Republican administrations and Democratic and Republican majorities in the House, the Hyde amendment has been the law. It is a commitment that no Federal tax dollars can be used to fund abortions, except in certain rare instances, and a commitment to protect the conscience rights of the great majority of American taxpayers who are opposed to publicly funding abortions.
Since 2006, the Weldon amendment has protected the conscience rights of healthcare providers to not participate in abortions if they have a moral objection to the procedure.
The very same Democratic majority that controls the House today had no apparent issue with the Hyde and Weldon amendments just 1 year ago since they were carried on their Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill without any issue. Yet, this year, the majority has inexplicably chosen not to include these bipartisan provisions, despite receiving support from every Democrat on the Appropriations Committee only last year.
Removing language that has been included in appropriations bills for decades is not only an overreach by the far left, but it also threatens to destabilize and upend the entire appropriations process. Appropriations bills simply cannot pass both Chambers and be signed into law without this language.
Eliminating the Hyde and Weldon amendments, given all of their importance to the American people, also eliminates the opportunity for bipartisanship. Without a bipartisan deal approved by both Chambers, we cannot reach a successful conclusion to the fiscal year 2022 appropriations process.
Removing this language sends us on a collision course for a yearlong continuing resolution or, worse, a government shutdown.
Madam Speaker, I filed an amendment to today's package to restore the Hyde and Weldon amendments. I did not do so alone. I was joined by every single Republican Member in this body--every single one. All 213 members of the Republican Conference signed on to this important amendment. Yet, when the Rules Committee met yesterday, I was shocked that my amendment was not made in order.
Madam Speaker, I find it stunning that the majority would not back provisions that are this important to the American people. But it serves to show how deeply partisan the package before us today actually is. The majority simply prefers to ram through their own partisan policy rather than provisions that have had bipartisan support for decades.
I find that deeply disappointing, Madam Speaker. But I know that today's bill will not be the last word. Whether the majority likes it or not, at the end of the day, we will have to reach a bipartisan and bicameral deal on spending for fiscal year 2022. The alternative is too bleak to contemplate.
But if the majority fails to compromise and fails to work with Republicans, both here and across the Capitol, then they will have only themselves to blame. They will bear the responsibility for the consequences, a continuing resolution or, even worse, a government shutdown.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Madam Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up H.R. 4698 for immediate consideration. This bill addresses the growing problem in American schools of educators pushing their own ideology onto students by forcing them to use the pedagogy of critical race theory.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Owens), the author of this amendment to further explain the amendment.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, it should be easy to agree that schools, especially primary schools, should focus solely on facts-based education, without political overtones.
Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from South Carolina (Ms. Mace), who will speak more about the importance of defeating the previous question because of the potential indoctrination of school children posed by schools teaching critical race theory.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Bishop), a passionate advocate on this issue, who will speak more about the previous question.
Mr. BISHOP of North Carolina. Madam Speaker, we should defeat the previous question in order to immediately consider H.R. 4698, Representative Burgess Owens' bill, called the Say No to Indoctrination Act.
The Nation has awakened to the insidious ideology, or better said, theology of critical race theory and its allied neo-Marxian concepts, all spawned in the fringes of academia.
After a few hardy individuals began focusing on this phenomenon, Americans have discovered with growing alarm that it seems to be everywhere: in the media, in the workplace, in our armed services, in healthcare, in churches, and, yes, in the classrooms where our school children are taught.
With this daunting realization, employees, soldiers, and moms and dads from all walks of life have been speaking out.
Now, the proponents of CRT are scrambling. Their first answer has been to play word games, to ridicule the notion that the ideology is present. But whether couched as CRT, critical social justice, conflict theory, race essentialism, intersectionality, White fragility, or many other names, Americans have seen it and they have caught on.
So the second line of defense--we just heard it--by the activists is to erect a straw man to falsely ascribe to those who confront CRT a motive to deny or conceal racial and group injustice in our history.
But Americans are on to that as well. They know that at the core of critical race theory is the mission to indoctrinate people, especially young people, into the idea that our country is forever locked into group conflict, especially racial conflict, so that the country, and certainly all White people, are irredeemably racists. It casts the American principles of individual liberty, meritocracy, and free enterprise as systems of oppression.
This condemns the progress our Nation has made since first stating its founding principles.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from North Carolina.
Mr. BISHOP of North Carolina. Madam Speaker, CRT has nothing to do with teaching accurate history.
It is impossible to overstate the danger of indoctrinating Americans with the belief that their race, or other group membership, is the primary determinant of their path in life.
My friends, Mr. Owens' bill ensures that this poison is not funded with taxpayer dollars. The U.S. Congress should catch up with the moms and dads confronting school boards across the country.
I encourage my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the previous question and to support Representative Owens' bill.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess), my very good friend, a distinguished member of both the Rules Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), my very good friend and the most distinguished defender of life in the Congress.
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, sadly the rule under consideration precludes a vote on the Cole amendment to preserve the Hyde amendment and Weldon conscience protection law as well as other pro-life amendments, including one that I first successfully offered back in 1983 prohibiting abortion funding in the Federal Employees Health Benefits program. All of our amendments were ruled out of order. That is tragic; we are not even going to get to vote on these lifesaving measures.
Madam Speaker, the Hyde amendment has saved more than 2.4 million lives, about 60,000 per year since first enacted. If retained in law, more innocent lives will be protected.
It is time, I believe, for more of us to face the harsh reality of what abortion actually does to children. No one in the media ever bothers to expose the violent methods of abortion that include dismemberment of a child's fragile body, including decapitation; that drugs like RU-486 starve the baby to death; or that unborn babies killed by abortion at 20 weeks or later experience excruciating physical pain, and until rendered unconscious or dead by these hideous procedures, the baby feels the pain of every single cut.
Madam Speaker, abortion is not healthcare unless one construes the precious life of an unborn child to be analogous to a tumor to be excised or a disease to be vanquished.
Mr. Biden once wrote to constituents explaining his support for laws against funding for abortion by saying, ``It would protect both the woman and her unborn child.'' He went on to say that ``those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them.''
Over the years, the polls have consistently shown that Americans do not support taxpayer funding of abortion. The January 2021 Marist poll found that 58 percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion as opposed to 38 percent who support it. The Marist poll also found a supermajority of 65 percent Independents oppose taxpayer funding of abortion.
Madam Speaker, unborn babies need the President of the United States of America and Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to be their friends and advocates, not powerful adversaries.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Van Drew), my good friend.
Mr. VAN DREW. Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to this shameful legislation.
This single vote encompasses seven unrelated spending bills. This is a broken legislative process.
The bill includes poison pills that make it impossible for me and for my colleagues to support this in good conscience. This is exactly as the majority intended. Today's vote is simply an attempt to strategically inflict political pain.
Our country is tired, tired of political gamesmanship, tired of partisan maneuvering, tired of this selfish dysfunction.
On behalf of the American people, I ask the majority to stop. I must ask the majority to stop. There is an ability to work together. This is not it.
If this were an earnest attempt at legislating, I could lend my support where appropriate. Unfortunately, I must oppose this rule and this legislation.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Van Duyne).
Ms. VAN DUYNE. Madam Speaker, I wish I could say I was rising in support of this legislation but, again, we are being asked to vote on a bill that represents a missed opportunity on the backs of our constituents.
I am pleased I was able to secure needed improvement for DFW Airport in the appropriations legislation. These projects would not only improve my district but the whole region.
I have held roundtables and formed a working group with local leaders and stakeholders who know what is best for my community and what I heard from them and fought to include in legislation funding our government is, sadly, not what we are debating today.
Instead of working to craft bipartisan legislation which Members on both sides of the aisle can support, the Senate can pass, and the President can sign into law, we are, instead, debating monstrous appropriations bills that are based on unrealistic, irresponsible funding levels and include partisan policy provisions that will only delay funding and passage.
These political games only serve to impede badly needed infrastructure projects. No, the Democrats didn't shut down the government, they just tried to shut down the rest of the country. I would love to be able to work on legislation that we can work on together that will actually advance what we are trying to do in this country. I urge opposition to this rule.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from Indiana (Mrs. Walorski).
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Smith), my very good friend and the ranking member of the Budget Committee.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield the gentleman an additional 15 seconds.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I would advise the gentleman that I am prepared to close whenever he is. Madam Speaker, can I inquire how much time remains?
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
I want to begin by thanking my good friend, Mr. McGovern, the chairman of the Rules Committee, as we always have a spirited debate and lively exchange and we don't always agree on things, but I always appreciate his faith in the institution, his willingness to engage in debate, and his friendship and decency as we work through our differences.
Madam Speaker, the bill before us today is a deeply misguided bill. I say that as someone who serves on the Appropriations Committee. The spending package covering seven different appropriations bills is marked to numbers that simply don't make sense.
Contrary to what my friend claimed, we haven't had a massive disinvestment in domestic spending over the last 4 years. Quite the opposite. There have been steady and, I think, genuinely merited increases. This is an explosion of spending tied to additional spending that is promised down the road in the form of a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
Now, everything is funded except, as my good friend from Missouri said, the things that keep us safe and free. The defense budget is laughable. We have had a succession of Secretaries--on both sides of the aisle, by the way--who have told us we need a 3 to 5 percent increase beyond inflation in defense over the next several years.
We don't have a defense bill on the floor. We are not likely to see one any time soon, but the reality is, the defense bill my friends propose actually is an inflation-adjusted cut in the defense of the United States, a cut at a time that we are dealing with Russian and Chinese aggression and dangerous adventurism in other parts of the world by regional adversaries like North Korea and Iran. That is irresponsible.
We all know we have a crisis on the southern border. We won't see the Homeland Security bill either because that is flat funded and not meeting the obvious needs that we have there. But we do have an extraordinary explosion in domestic spending, one that is simply not justified and can't be sustained.
If those were my only objections, I would think at some point we could probably find some sort of reasonable compromise, because my friends know at the end of the day they have to get to 60 votes in the United States Senate. However, in addition to that, they have ripped out things like the Hyde and Weldon amendments that have been in these bills for 45 years, in the case of the Hyde amendment, 15 or 16 years in the case of the Weldon amendment. Those are deal-breaking bills to us.
Now, my friends have routinely voted for those things for decades; not for years but for decades, and Presidents of both parties have signed them. As I have mentioned to my friends yesterday in the Rules Committee, it was a Democratic Congress that passed the Hyde amendment, overwhelmingly Democrat in both Chambers.
My friends have changed their view about the life issue. That is their right. I respect it. We have not. We have not changed our views on conscience issues. My friends know that if that language in the Hyde amendment and the Weldon amendment are not restored to the appropriations bills, they are not going to have any of these grand bills or even compromise bills. They are going to end up with a continuing resolution, at best.
For those people who are watching that don't know what a continuing resolution is, it is simply last year's spending with the Weldon and Hyde amendments. In effect, a Democratic President, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate will have produced Donald Trump's last- negotiated budget. That is where we are headed unless my friends decide to restore that language. That is an absolute deal-breaker for us if it is not.
The other thing that I would mention to my good friends on the other side is that there is still some time to do some things. This is a long process, and I understand setting out your negotiating position. But let's not be under any illusion that what we are talking about today will ever become law. It will never be passed by the Senate. It will never reach the desk of the President of the United States.
Madam Speaker, I urge my friends to reject the rule, reject the bill, and sit down and bargain in good faith. We can get there.
As I have said on many occasions, I have had the great privilege of having been chairman and ranking member of the largest component bill in this group. On six different occasions, both as chairman and ranking member, working with my good friend, the chairwoman of the full committee, Representative DeLauro, we came to a deal. All six times, the bill was out of committee, across the floor, signed by the President. It didn't matter who was chairman or ranking member. It didn't matter which party controlled. It didn't matter who the President was.
That is six times in a row. We can do that again a seventh time in this bill. There are some good things in this bill, as my friend says, some things I certainly support. But there can be such a thing as too much of a good thing, and there is way too much of a good thing in this bill in terms of the amount of money it spends.
At the end of the day, if we are going to have an appropriations process that works, if we are going to have a deal--and we both should want a deal--then the defense number is going to have to come up. The discretionary spending number, which is embodied in this bill, is going to have to come down, and the Hyde and Weldon amendments are going to have to be restored.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. COLE. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
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