Presidential Veto
Floor Speech
PRESIDENTIAL VETO -- (Senate - November 13, 2007)
Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, they say in life you can really judge a person's values by where they put their wealth. Certainly, we all love our families, and we think nothing of spending a lot of money on our children. We all value our health, and we go to great extent to spend whatever is necessary to have a healthy lifestyle and to live on for many years.
The President, today, had a chance to demonstrate his values with his veto pen. He had a chance to decide what priorities we should have in America for our future. We sent him a bill called the Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill.
There was a venerable Congressman from Kentucky named Bill Natcher. He served for many years and distinguished himself as never having missed a rollcall vote in his life. I will not get into that side story, but his responsibility in the House Appropriations Committee was to chair the subcommittee that generated this spending bill, the Labor, Health and Human Services bill, the bill that includes education, health care, medical research--programs that really directly reach the people of America. He called it the people's bill. He used to wear these starched white shirts and dark-blue suits and silver-gray ties. He looked like a Senator. He had the gray hair and would stand there and say: This is the people's bill. The people should vote for it. And they did. Overwhelmingly, House Members--Democrats and Republicans--would vote for it because this bill really does reach families everywhere across America.
President Bush decided to veto this bill today. He vetoed the bill, which is rare. Incidentally, he never vetoed a bill until this year. Now, he has, after a long search, found his veto pen and is using it frequently. He vetoed this bill this year because it called for 4 percent more spending than he had asked for--$6 billion.
Madam President, $6 billion is a lot of money, for sure, but not by Federal budget standards. The President, before he vetoed this bill, signed the Defense appropriations bill. That bill was 10 percent over his request, and yet he signed it. When it came to this bill that reaches families and people across America, he said no.
Of course, this President, who says we cannot afford $6 billion for programs for the American people, is asking us for $196 billion for programs for the people of Iraq--$196 billion.
It is hard to understand how we cannot afford health care in America, cancer research in America, education in America, worker protection in America, homeless shelters for veterans in America, yet $196 billion for Iraq. I said it before. This President gets up every morning in the White House, opens the window, looks outside and sees Iraq. He doesn't see America, because if he would see America, he would understand the American people across this Nation value so much the priorities he vetoed today.
Yesterday we celebrated Veterans Day. We acknowledged what the men and women who have served this country mean to us, our history, and our future. There were a lot of good speeches given by great politicians talking about how much we value our veterans. Those speeches had hardly been finished when the President returned to the White House to veto this bill.
This bill would have provided funding for employment and health programs for veterans. It is hard to believe in America that one out of four homeless people is a veteran. You see them on the streets of your town, large and small; you see them standing on the highways with little cardboard signs. One out of four of them is a veteran. This bill tried to provide counseling, shelter, ways to give these veterans a place to sleep at night. The President vetoed it and said it was too darn much spending.
This bill would have provided $228 million for veterans employment, $9.5 million for traumatic brain injury, and $23.6 million for the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Programs.
Last night on television I saw a program. James Gandolfini, who was the star of ``The Sopranos,'' had a special documentary; I believe it was called ``Alive Day.'' I think that was the name of it, but you couldn't miss it if you saw it because he invited veterans on this program to be interviewed, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who had been injured. These young men and women came and talked about their love of this country, their service to our Nation and what they had been through. This beautiful young woman who had been a lieutenant in the Army had a rocket-propelled grenade explode right next to her, tearing off her right arm and shoulder. She now has a prosthetic arm that appears to be real but of course does not even have function to it, but it is what she uses. It was a touching moment when she talked about what her future would be, this beautiful young woman, this disabled veteran.
There were many amputees--some of them double amputees--talking about trying to put their lives back together. Some of the most painful episodes involve victims of traumatic brain injury. There was one young man with his mother sitting next to him. They showed before pictures, when he was a hard-charging soldier, happy go lucky and a lot of fun, who then sustained a serious traumatic brain injury and now is in a wheelchair. He hopes the day will come when he can once again walk and run. It is hard to imagine we could give tribute to those veterans yesterday and veto a bill today that would have spent just $9.5 million for traumatic brain injury programs, but the President did that this morning.
The President came to Washington and said he wanted to be the education President. We remember it well because he came up with a new term we hadn't heard before called No Child Left Behind; he persuaded leaders on both sides of the aisle to vote for it and produced a new education program for America. This bill provided money to make that program work. It is not enough to identify the problems in our schools and the difficulties facing our children and our students; you need help to make certain you have the best teachers in the classroom, the proper class size, the right equipment at the school.
We also understand early childhood education is essential for kids to succeed. Show me a family where the mom and dad focus on teaching that child to read and read to the child and take the child out and speak to them in adult terms and I will show you a child probably destined to be pretty good in kindergarten. A lot of kids don't have that good fortune; mom and dad are off to work. So the Head Start Program is a way to give them a fighting chance. The bill the President vetoed today included more than $7 billion for the Head Start Program, increasing it by $200 million from last year. The President said we can't afford to increase the Head Start Program.
The bill also included $18 billion for higher education initiatives and student financial aid. How many working families do you know with a child they want to see go to the best school in America, struggling with the idea of how they will pay for it and the debt they will carry out of school? We put money in this bill to help those families help those students, and the President said we can't afford it.
The President's budget would have provided title I funds for 117,000 fewer students and cut the number of new teachers in classrooms by 8,000. So the President says it is wasteful for us to provide title I funds to help children from disadvantaged families--117,000 more--and new teachers and classrooms by 8,000. At the same time, he wants $196 billion for a war in Iraq not paid for.
In Illinois, almost 3,500 students will be left behind by the President's veto, and 200 teachers will not be hired. Will that be better for those schools, those families, those children? Of course not.
The appropriations bill the President vetoed also included $11.3 billion for special ed, kids with special challenges who need special help and with that help have a chance to succeed. The President said we spend too much money on those kids and he vetoed it.
Had Congress provided what the President requested, Federal funding for disabled children would be lower by an average of $117 per child. I have been in schools with special education classes, and I have watched the special care those children need and receive, often one-on-one help. If that teacher is caring and competent, the child has a chance--just a chance--to come out of the shadows of darkness and have a future. That is what this bill is about--a bill the President says America cannot afford.
In the area of health care--this is one I think touches me and most people--we included $29 billion for medical research at 27 institutes and centers at the National Institutes of Health. Senator Mikulski knows all about this. This is in her neck of the woods in Maryland. The National Institutes of Health and what they achieve, we put in this bill $29 billion and included $1.4 billion more than the President requested for medical research at NIH.
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Mr. DURBIN. I am aware of it. I will tell my colleagues the Senator from Maryland probably recalls that over the last 10 years or so, this has kind of been an area of real bipartisan cooperation. We may fight like cats and dogs over everything else, but we said: Come on, when it comes to the National Institutes of Health and medical research, Democrats get sick and Republicans get sick, too, and our kids do as well, so let's all join hands and promise we are going to increase the spending for medical research, not just to find the cures but also, as the Senator from Maryland says, to build up the infrastructure of talented professionals who will devote their lives to this medical research. The President says: No, we can't afford it.
Madam President, $1.4 billion, we can't afford to spend $1.4 billion more on cancer research, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's? We can't afford that? Well, for $12 billion to $15 billion a month, we can obviously afford a war in Iraq, but the President can't find money for the war against disease and death in this country. That is truly unfortunate.
Since I see my colleague from Maryland, I will surrender the floor and give her a chance to speak. I hope this veto today will not go unnoticed. Elections have consequences. In the last election, the American people said: We are going to give you--the Democrats--a majority in the Senate and a majority in the House. Now do something with it.
We have tried. We have succeeded in many areas. But we have run into the opposition of this President more often than not. When we tried to change the course and policy of the war in Iraq, the President used his first veto as President of the United States to veto on foreign policy, to veto that decision. When we tried to change his horrendous decision to stop medical research involving stem cells, he used his veto pen again. When we tried to provide children's health insurance for millions of kids across America who are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but not lucky enough to have health insurance in their family, he used his veto pen again. He used it again today.
Why is it a recurring theme that we see this President stopping efforts by this Democratic Congress to address the issues people care about: Health care, making sure we have the best; medical research to find those cures; making sure our schools are preparing the next generation of leaders; making certain that as a country, we move forward in providing health insurance protection for kids. It is a sad moment.
I hope the House of Representatives can rally the votes to override that veto. I hope a few of our Republican friends who joined us in passing this bill, with over 70 votes, if I am not mistaken--I think close to 75 votes--I hope they will stand with us again and override this President's veto--a mistake, a mistake this President made at the expense of America's families.
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