Providing for Consideration of Senate Amendment to House Amendment to Senate Amendment to H.R. 2764, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008

Floor Speech

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Mr. SESSIONS. I want to thank the gentleman from Florida, my friend, for yielding me the time.

Madam Speaker, we are here right now for the purpose of providing for the consideration of the Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to the bill, H.R. 2764. That is what we are here for. I will repeat that. We are here for providing for the consideration of the Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment. It is rather confusing, not just to Members of Congress. It is confusing, I think, to the American people, also.

Madam Speaker, today, I would like to just read from the Calendar, Wednesday, December 19 on the back page, ``Status of Major Bills, First Session.'' Here is essentially what it says.

It says that Homeland Security appropriations was completed on June 8 in the House and July 26 in the Senate. Never sent to conference.

Energy and Water appropriations, July 17. Never completed by the Senate.

Military Construction and VA, June 15 in the House, September 6 in the Senate.

The new fiscal year has already started. This new Democrat majority has been sitting on these bills, including the VA, since September 6. And yet they are coming to the floor today just a week before Christmas terribly upset, terribly upset, and yet it says here, let me see if I got this right, sent to conference, these are all blanks. They didn't go to conference. The Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader never had a conference. They didn't get together to try and work out the differences that they had. What they did is they let Members sit day after day after day.

Just 1 year and 75 days ago, when Republicans had completed all but one of these bills, we were called irresponsible and we couldn't do the people's business. And yet here we are, 1 year later plus 75 days, and only one of the bills has made it to the President. I could keep going. Financial Services and General Government; Labor, Health, Human Services and Education.

My gosh, what is happening?

What is happening to this House of Representatives and the United States Congress? What is happening is that I believe we had what I would consider to be false hopes and promises that were established in the first place about all these problems that were going to go away. Just give our good friends, the Democrats, that ability to hold the House and Senate, and they will do it. But, Madam Speaker, they didn't even get the work done between themselves, forget blaming things on the President of the United States or Republicans. They couldn't even appoint their own conferees. They couldn't even do their own work.

Today, we sit here and listen to all the things that are still wrong and about how Republicans have stood in the way and been obstructionists. That is not the facts of the case. The facts of the case are all these bills that I have talked about were never even sent to a conference, and today, the reason why we are still talking is because allegedly there is a glitch, a glitch, because the negotiations between the majority in the House and the majority in the Senate couldn't get it right. Well, if you do things in the dark, if you do things where nobody else is involved, that is what you get. I am told it's a $70 billion mistake.

I just don't understand why business is done this way, when 1 year ago we had all but one bill done before the election. All but one. If you systematically go through a process and work through the bills in the light of day, where the information is posted on the Web site, where you give people time to read the bill, I think a better result happens.

I think it's deceptive. I think it's deceptive to say that this House would be the most honest, open, and ethical Congress in the history, when there was no attempt from the very beginning to even live up to that.

So here we are, just a few days before Christmas, still burning time, trying to burn time, because we know that the negotiators have to fix the problems, and that is a real problem to this House, and I think it is to the American people.

Madam Speaker, I would like to take just a few minutes to say this. The Republican Party congratulates our colleagues and all of us today for presumably ending what we are doing, and I am pleased to say that it was a victory for the taxpayers because we are not going to increase taxes, as our good friends the Democrats wanted to do and have bemoaned all week long about not getting that massive tax increase.

We are going to go and make sure in SCHIP that we don't take 2 million children from their own private insurance to a government-run program that is still overburdened. We are going to make sure that we don't do, I think, bad things in dealing with our ability to find terrorists with the FISA bill.

So it's a great victory today for the taxpayer, for the people who want to protect this country, because what has prevailed is what we said should happen, and that is that the Republican minority kept after this process to make sure that the taxpayers don't lose on this last day before we leave before Christmas, and we are going to stay after that because we believe we are doing the right thing.

I am proud of what we will accomplish here today if we can find this $70 billion mistake that has happened and we can close the books on the year and know we went home with no further damage.

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