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

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

Mr. REED. Mr. President, I express my deep concern about several provisions contained in this omnibus legislation. Many of these provisions were in direct contradiction to the bipartisan actions of this Senate and the House of Representatives. It is alarming to me that in an Omnibus appropriations bill that the will previously expressed by both the House and the Senate would be contravened so arbitrarily and so dramatically. I am concerned about the process, as well as the specific issue that I come to speak about today.

First, tucked into this massive spending bill are several out and out gifts to the gun lobby. Some were included in a controversial House amendment and another was slipped into the bill later by the Republican leadership without a vote by the House and Senate conferees. That is highly unusual and, in terms of procedure, very dangerous to the functioning of this body and, indeed, to the constitutional obligations we must perform.

These provisions, with respect to guns, reduce law enforcement's abilities to carry out their responsibility to enforce our Nation's gun laws, and they do not provide any benefit to law-abiding gun owners. The other people who benefit from these provisions are criminals and prohibited purchasers, those who should not have firearms, according to the laws of this country. Again, I hear time after time that all we should do with respect to gun safety in this country is just enforce the laws. This is the mantra of the NRA and of the gun advocates. But how can you enforce the laws if law enforcement authorities are required to destroy information they obtain through the gun sales procedures under the Brady Act?

From the beginning, this attack on law enforcement's authority has been highly suspicious. According to a report in the Washington Post on July 21, 2003, Representative TODD TIAHRT, in the words of the Washington Post "surprised many of his fellow Republicans" when he offered an amendment in the House Appropriations Committee. In fact, Representative Frank Wolf, who chairs the Commerce, Justice, State Subcommittee on Appropriations, objected to the amendment, saying he had not had time to review it prior to its presentation. But Representative Tiahrt refused to withdraw the amendment and he won passage on a 31-to-30 vote, over the opposition of Chairman WOLF and Appropriations Committee Chairman BILL YOUNG.

Meanwhile, Mr. Tiahrt assured his colleagues that the NRA had reviewed the language. He said, "I wanted to make sure I was fulfilling the needs of my friends who are firearms dealers" and that the NRA officials "were helpful in making sure I had my bases covered."

This insertion of language over the objections of the subcommittee chairman and the full Appropriations Committee chairman, at the behest of the NRA, to take care of your friends who are firearms dealers is not what we should embrace in this Omnibus appropriations bill.

In the conference between the House and the Senate, appropriators modified several of the provisions on a bipartisan basis of the original amendment offered by Representative Tiahrt. But the Republican leadership later inserted a most objectionable item over, presumptively, the objections of the committee chairman and the subcommittee chairman. The provision would require the FBI to destroy approved gun sale records within 24 hours.

The 24-hours-records-destruction provision would put more guns in the hands of criminals by preventing the FBI from discovering and correcting erroneous gun sales under the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Currently, approved gun sale records are retained for 90 days to allow the FBI to perform audits of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, to ensure that if criminals or terrorists or other prohibited purchasers have acquired such a weapon incorrectly, and contrary to law, that these mistakes can be corrected, that the guns can be retrieved. This is not an imaginary problem. The General Accounting Office found that the during the first 6 months of the 90-day retention policy, the FBI used retained records to initiate 235 firearm retrieval actions, of which 228, or 97 percent, could not have been initiated under the next-day destruction policy required by this Omnibus appropriations bill.

Let me repeat that. In a 6-month period, the auditing of these records enabled retrieval of 235 firearms that were in the hands of prohibited persons-criminals, people who were spouse abusers, the whole category of perpetrators who are prohibited from having firearms because of their records-235. If this rule were in effect then, they would have recovered 7, leaving 228 with dangerous individuals whose conduct has already underscored their unworthiness to carry a firearm. They would have had these weapons. I can't see any other result of this policy than to put more weapons in the hands of identified criminals or identified violent individuals.

No one in this country is walking around saying let's give violent criminals more guns. Again, the mantra is: Just enforce the laws. Make sure those criminals don't have access to weapons. This provision cuts at the heart of all the rhetoric and all the hyperbole about "just enforce the laws" and "guns don't kill, criminals kill," and exposes a grotesque miscarriage of justice. That is why organizations such as the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the FBI Agents Association oppose this provision.

But that is not all that is included in this Omnibus appropriations bill. The bill would also prohibit the ATF, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau, from finalizing a proposed August 2000 rule that would require gun dealers to conduct an annual physical inventory of the weapons in their possession. The purpose of the proposed rule is to allow dealers to go ahead and identify missing and stolen firearms and report them to the ATF in a timely fashion.

You would think every responsible dealer in this country would conduct periodic inventories and, as soon as a weapon was discovered missing or stolen, their first instincts would be to contact authorities. But we know that is not the case because this community of Washington, DC suffered through a string of sniper killings months ago that traumatized not only Washington but the entire Nation, and this string of sniper killings can be traced back to a weapon at Bulls Eye Shooter Supply, the gun seller where John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo obtained the assault rifle used in these attacks. After the snipers were apprehended, the gun was recovered and was traced back to Bulls Eye. What did they say? They had no record of selling the gun. They didn't even know the gun was missing until the shooting spree was over. The snipers' gun was just one of more than 238 firearms missing from Bulls Eye's inventory during the previous 3 years-a dealer who is missing 238 weapons in a 3-year period, one of which turns out to be the murder weapon in one of the most heinous assaults in the United States in many years. The ATF proposal requiring dealers such as Bulls Eye to conduct annual physical inventories is still pending. We should be urging them not to suspend this rule but to enact this rule. What could be more commonsensical, more obvious, after the sniper killings in Washington, than allowing the ATF to promulgate a rule so there is at least a physical inventory and requirement to report missing weapons?

We have learned nothing from the deaths of these people. We have learned nothing from the death of Conrad Johnson, a bus driver sitting in his bus reading his paper at 6:30 in the morning, supporting his family-his wife and his children-who was killed by these snipers.

This, to me, is preposterous. Yet here we are, trying to take an omnibus bill, holding billions of dollars in appropriations for all the programs my colleague from Missouri talked about that we all support-holding them hostage to provisions like this, to provisions that fly in the face of our experience and that undercut all the rhetoric when we talked about learning from the mistakes of the past, from ensuring that criminals don't have weapons, from enforcing the laws. We are undercutting the ability of law enforcement to do their job.

Finally, this bill prohibits release of any information regarding firearms production or sale that is required to be kept by gun dealers or manufacturers. In addition, no information or records regarding multiple handgun sales-where two or more handguns are sold to the same buyer within 5 days-or crime-gun-tracing information that is reported to the ATF could be reported to the public. No, let's throw a cloak of silence over all of these laws, eviscerate the regulation, and prevent any disclosure of information that should be public.

ATF has in the past made this information available under the Freedom of Information Act, but this information has been used to highlight some of the discrepancies and difficulties and deficiencies in our gun laws. As a result, the gun lobby doesn't want it out: No information, no knowledge, no problem. That is not right. There are problems here, problems we should address responsibly, and we are undercutting a responsible approach to ensuring that the present laws on the books are enforced. So the next time someone stands up and says just enforce the laws, remember you can't enforce the laws if you don't know how they are being enforced-and that is the purpose of this provision-and you certainly can't require law enforcement authorities to enforce laws when they are prohibited from having the information to do that.

This is an important right for the public to know, particularly with respect to firearms tracing from crime scenes. As a result of publicly available information, there have been identified several firearms dealers who were the source of a preponderance of weapons at crime scenes. That is valuable information, not only to law enforcement authorities but to the general public, and that information should be public.

We are facing numerous problems about gun violence. We have the threat of terrorism. Last night the President spoke repeatedly about terrorists. This is a situation made to be manipulated by terrorists who want firearms. If the record of their purchases is destroyed in 24 hours, if there is no requirement for an inventory of weapons, think of how we are setting out a situation that can be exploited, not just by criminals but by people with even more malign designs on this country. We are doing it and we are doing it in the middle of the night, figuratively speaking. None of these issues was fully debated, particularly the destruction of records within 24 hours. Procedurally we should reject it. Substantively we should reject it.

There is another issue we should be concerned about that many of my colleagues mentioned, and that is the overtime rule for American workers.

Last year, the administration announced its proposal to significantly weaken overtime protection. The proposal would take away from many hard-working Americans their ability to earn enough to support their families. The timing of this proposal is even more egregious. It comes during a period when more and more Americans are struggling to make ends meet and while the country is bleeding jobs overseas.

It was announced this week that IBM was going to hire 15,000 people this year. The only problem is that they are only
going to hire about 1,500 in the United States.

Yet for those people who are struggling to find jobs, to keep jobs, and to better their lives, we are telling the employers they do not have to pay overtime. It doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense to this Senate because on September 10, the Senate passed a measure to prevent millions of American workers from being stripped of their overtime. We acted in a bipartisan fashion. In doing so, we reaffirmed our support for protecting these hard-working Americans.

Unfortunately, safeguards to overtime pay were stripped out at the President's request, again leaving Americans vulnerable.

At a time when the President is talking about job growth and providing additional benefits to families, why does he want to weaken the laws designed to create jobs and to protect hard-working Americans? We know what is happening today. Employers are not hiring full-time workers. They are extending the hours of their existing workforce because of the pressures they face. When you lower the number of people who qualify for overtime pay, that is an incentive to continue that practice of simply extending the hours of current workers and not hiring new workers. This will go against our hopes by all, I believe, that this year our economy can start hiring people again-not simply adding a few hours to the workday of existing workers. But certainly those few hours of additional work deserve to be compensated by overtime. This law cuts it. About 11 million workers receive overtime pay. Many understaffed fields such as nursing are required by law in many communities to pay mandatory overtime. Yet under this rule, that mandatory overtime would not in all cases be compensated.

Other workers rely on this extra income simply to make ends meet. The people who are in danger of losing their benefits are health care workers and technicians, paralegals, restaurant workers, draftsmen, therapists, retail managers, news reporters, police officers, firefighters, and even military reservists.

What I find most objectionable is that this proposal basically says that reservists who are coming back who have had certain kinds of training in the Armed Forces are no longer considered eligible for overtime pay. This is preposterous. These individuals could literally have left their employment a few months ago to respond to the call of the Nation in a time of danger and receive some training while they are in the military, or have that training before on the weekends as a reservist, and now find themselves penalized for the training they received in the military in terms of getting overtime pay. That is preposterous. That is what this rule would do. It could affect thousands of military reservists. That is not only unfortunate in individual cases, but that is a stunning snub to Americans who are risking their lives in serving their country collectively.

I again am amazed that such a proposal would even be submitted, and I am more amazed that we would, today, be prepared to vote on it in this Omnibus appropriations bill.

American workers work more hours than any others in the world-1,900 hours per year. Yet, still, they need more to get by and to make ends meet.

I am amazed that the administration would continue on this track of undercutting overtime in the United States, and I am extremely disappointed. Rather than trying to undercut the wages of Americans, we should be looking for ways to increase the wages of Americans.

I think these two provisions are problematic. Many more of my colleagues have spoken about that and have called into serious question both the procedures that brought us here and certainly the substance of these proposals.

At this time, in conclusion, I would like to propound a unanimous consent request.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of a concurrent resolution which I shall send to the desk correcting the enrollment of the omnibus conference report; the resolution strikes the language which requires the FBI to destroy gun purchase background check information after 24 hours; that the current resolution be agreed to, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I object.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.

Mr. REED. Mr. President, I yield the floor.