Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2004-Conference Report-Continued

AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2004-CONFERENCE REPORT-CONTINUED

Mr. REED. Mr. President, the Omnibus appropriations bill contains elements that contradict the express votes of this body and the other body, bipartisan votes that in fact protected workers against losing their overtime, that insisted upon country-of-origin labeling, that dealt with media ownership. And at the last moment, at the direction of the administration, these provisions were overridden and contradicted. There are other provisions that have been included in this measure that should not stand a fair vote on the Senate floor.

There is a provision, inserted in this bill by the House Republican leadership over the objection of the Republican subcommittee chairman of the Commerce-State-Justice and Judiciary Committee, that would require the FBI to destroy records of gun sales within 24 hours. They have now, under the law, the Brady bill, the authority to keep these records for 90 days to conduct audits of the system of instant checks.

A study analyzing just 6 months' activity conducted by the General Accounting Office showed that the FBI was able to retrieve 235 firearms that had been sold to illegal purchasers, prohibited purchasers, wife beaters, murderers, the whole parade of perpetrators. If this legislation passes and the 24-hour rule stands, then instead of recovering 235 of these weapons, 7,228 firearms will be in the hands of murderers, wife beaters, robbers, those people who endanger the American public.

This provision should not be allowed, without a vote, to become the law of the land. In the words of Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton:

I'm very opposed to this effort to make the Brady law toothless, and I just don't understand how Members of Congress can even consider it. Obviously, they haven't shown up at the scene of enough officer shootings.

What we hear from the NRA and their allies is "just enforce the laws." How can you enforce the law if you don't have the information on the sale?

This provision should be stricken. In addition to that, there are provisions about vouchers for public schools in the District of Columbia. We don't have enough resources to fix the public schools of this country, and diverting them to private schools is a mistake. It is passing out parachutes; it is not fixing the airplane. We can do better.

Indeed, these vouchers go to schools that don't have to stand up to the rigors of the No Child Left Behind Act. Those people who go about this country saying that critics of the No Child Left Behind Act-those people who will not embrace these provisions-are somehow undermining education reform but they say, let's give money to schools that don't even have to follow the No Child Left Behind Act. That is also wrong.

As my colleague Senator Kennedy pointed out, this bill strips away overtime protections for Americans who work very hard. These workers depend on overtime to support their families. Costs go up, hours of work are going up, and still families find themselves stretched terribly thin. We are in a position now not only to override both the sense of the House and Senate but the common sense of the American people. They understand that without adequate overtime people cannot support their families.

In addition to this provision that would strip away overtime pay for firefighters, nurses, and police officers, the Department of Labor had the audacity to suggest ways in which overtime can be prevented from applying to everyone. That is not a Department of Labor that is working in the best interest of the American workers.

We understand something else, too, which is that the great economic crisis of this country at this moment is the fact that we cannot produce jobs. Employers are not willing to hire, so they require more overtime. Well, if they have less incentives, less requirements to pay overtime pay, they will make the current workers work even harder, and there will not be the opportunity to hire more Americans for these jobs. This provision goes right to the heart of what we all should be about: getting more work for Americans, not penalizing workers by taking away their overtime pay.

These are just a handful of provisions that are not only contradictory to what we did on a bipartisan basis-Republicans and Democrats in both the House and Senate-but they are fundamentally against the interests of safe streets, opportunities to work, and opportunities to educate the children of this country.

I yield the floor.