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“BUDGET NEGOTIATIONS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the Senate section on pages S12297-S12299 on Oct. 10, 1998.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
BUDGET NEGOTIATIONS
Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I want to make several comments concerning some of the negotiations that are going forward. I remind my colleagues in the Congress that the Constitution gives the Congress, not the President, the authority and the responsibility to appropriate money, to pass bills. As a matter of fact, article I of the Constitution says:
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States. . . .
Not in the executive branch, in the Congress, in the people's body.
It also says under article I, section 9:
No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law.
Again, made by Congress. I think some people in the administration think that they are Congress now, that they can write appropriations bills. That is not constitutional. The President has his constitutional authority, and if he wants to veto appropriations bills, he has a right to do so. Let him exercise that right. He doesn't have a right to write appropriations bills.
For some reason, some people have gotten this idea that the administration is an equal partner. They are an equal branch of Government, but we have different functions in Government. The executive branch can submit a budget, they can confer, they can consult, but Congress passes the appropriations bills, and we need to do so.
Now we have the President making ever-extending demands: ``Well, I'm not going to sign that bill if you don't spend so much money.'' Fine. Very good. He vetoed the Agriculture Department appropriations bill because he said we didn't spend enough money and didn't spend enough money under the guise of emergency agriculture assistance.
He requested $2.3 billion for emergency assistance. We appropriated
$4.2 billion, and he vetoed it and said, ``We want to spend $7 billion.'' In a period of a couple of weeks, he more than doubled his demands. He has a right to veto the bill; fine. He doesn't have a right to write the bill.
Many people in his administration, maybe the President himself, seem to think, ``We are going to write the bill; we're just not going to sign it; if they don't give us more money, we are going to shut down the Government.'' Fine, he can shut down the Government.
I stated to the press, and I will state it again, this Congress will pass as many continuing resolutions as necessary, and it may last all year. We may be operating under continuing resolutions all year long. I personally don't have any desire, any intention of funding all of the Presidential requests that are coming down the pike, for which, all of a sudden, he is making demands. I hope that our colleagues will support me in that effort.
I am not in that big a hurry to get out of town. I heard the President allude to that in a very partisan statement that he made yesterday with Members of Congress: ``We need to keep Congress in.'' Mr. President, we will stay in. We will pass resolutions continuing Government operations at 1998 levels, this year's levels. We will pass that as long as necessary.
We passed one for a week. We passed one for 3 days. We may have to pass another one. We may have to pass it for the balance of this year, maybe into next year, whatever is necessary. But I do not intend on being held hostage. The President said, ``Well, give me more money; I want to spend the surplus, whether it be for education, whether it be for Head Start.'' He has a whole laundry list. He calls them investments, but, frankly, they are a lot of new social spending. I don't have any desire to spend that money.
I am quite happy and willing to stay here all year, all year next year, if necessary, but I don't want us to succumb to his demands. I have no intention of succumbing to his demands. I am, frankly, bothered by the fact that at this stage in time, the President is really ratcheting up the partisan rhetoric. Frankly, that is not the right thing to do if he wants to work together.
It is interesting, the President made a very nice bipartisan speech saying, ``Yes, I compliment the Congress, they worked together and we passed the International Religious Freedom Act.'' I was involved with that. We worked with the administration. We did do bipartisan work. It took bipartisan work. But you don't get that kind of cooperation on the budget when you have the President making all kinds of partisan statements. I will give you an example.
In his radio address given to the Nation today, the President said:
This week, unfortunately, we saw partisanship defeat progress, as 51 Republican Senators joined together to kill the HMO Patients' Bill of Rights.
One, I just disagree with that. The majority of Republican Senators--
as a matter of fact, unanimous Republican Senators--said, ``We are willing to pass a Patients' Bill of Rights,'' not defeat one. ``We are willing to pass one.''
We made that offer to our colleagues on the Democratic side. We made it several times in June and several times in July. We said we were willing to pass this bill. As a matter of fact, we wanted to pass it before the August break. We made unanimous consent requests and said,
``We will pass either your bill or our bill. You have the best bill that you can put together. You worked on yours for months; we worked on our bill for months. Let's vote, let's pass it, let's go to conference with the House.''
But, no, the Democrats wouldn't agree with it. The Democrats kept us from passing a Patients' Bill of Rights. You don't pass a bill this complicated the last day of the session. Senator Daschle offered some amendment and said, ``Oh, let's run this through.'' That was nothing but for show.
Yet we even find an e-mail from the House Democrat events coordinator that said, ``Hey, let's put on a real show; let's have everybody get together; Senator Daschle can orchestrate this; we will have a bunch of colleagues.''
Sure enough, they had a bunch of colleagues go over in some show of support on the last day of the session. Bingo.
If they wanted to pass a Patients' Bill of Rights, they should have said ``Yea, we agree, we will pass them, find out where the votes are.'' The Democrats would never agree to a unanimous consent request to pass Patients' Bill of Rights.
They are the ones who killed the bill. When the President said, ``. .
. we saw partisanship defeat progress . . .'' he forgot to say the Democrats wouldn't agree to a process to pass the bill, which we offered in June and several times in July. He forgot to mention that. It kind of bothers me because, again, he says, ``We want bipartisanship,'' and he makes a partisan statement on a national radio address.
I have also heard the President state, ``We can't have a tax cut because we're going to reserve every dime of the surplus to protect Social Security.'' All the while--he knows it and we know it--he has his staff members running around the Congress saying, ``We want more money and we want to declare everything an emergency so it won't count on the budget, so it won't be part of the budget agreement'' that he adopted and agreed to in 1997. ``We want more money.''
The totals are right in the $18 billion, $20 billion-plus range. ``We want more money for a lot of things and, oh, yes, it is all off budget; it doesn't count; it's an emergency.'' What a great game.
Again, I remind my colleagues that the Congress is responsible for passing appropriations bills, and we need to pass them. If he vetoes them, fine, he can shut down the Government. We can pass continuing resolutions, and we can do that as much as necessary.
The President in his weekly radio address said:
Our Nation needs 100,000 new, highly qualified teachers to reduce class size in early grades.
He said, ``We need more teachers, more buildings.''
The President said:
So again today, I call on Congress to help communities build or modernize 5,000 schools with targeted tax credits.
Mr. President, I want more money for education. I want a lot better education, but I really don't want the President of the United States or some bureaucrat in the Department of Education deciding which school in Oklahoma gets a new teacher or which building in Oklahoma is going to be rebuilt or which classroom is going to be modernized or updated.
Why should we have that decision made in Washington, DC? Why should Federal bureaucrats be involved? Maybe our schools in Oklahoma need more teachers or maybe they need new buildings or maybe they need new computers. Why don't we trust Oklahomans to make that decision? Why don't we trust the parents and the teachers and the school boards? No, this administration does not trust local school boards, local teachers, parents, Governors to be making that decision.
He wants to mandate it from Washington, DC. This is a new demand. Guess what? We have had votes on these issues. He did not win. The President's program did not win. We had two or three votes earlier this year. He did not win on the school building program; did not win on the 100,000 new teachers. But yet this is a new demand, that he is going to try to get it, he is not going to sign the bill unless we fund it.
I am going to tell you right now, at least as far as this Senator is concerned--and maybe I do not control the conferences--but I do not have any intention to ever fund those programs. I think decisions on hiring teachers and building school buildings should be made in the local school districts, by the local school boards, by the parent/
teacher associations, by the Governors--not by those of us in Congress or, frankly, by some bureaucrat in the Department of Education.
So maybe we will be here for a long time. Again, the President has the right to veto the bill. Fine. Let him veto the bill. Maybe we will be operating on continuing resolutions for the rest of the year. If that is what happens, that is what happens. I will, again, repeat that we will pass enough continuing resolutions as necessary to keep Government open.
Maybe we will have to pass one every day. Maybe we will have to pass one every week. Maybe we will have to pass one every month. But we are not going to shut Government down. We are not going to demand anything. We will pass the continuing resolutions to keep Government operating at fiscal year 1998 levels as long as necessary. We will stay here. We are happy to stay next week. We are happy to stay the following week. We are happy to stay all year, if that is necessary. But I hope, and I believe, we are not going to succumb to this last-minute politicization of, ``We want more money. Let's spend the surplus.''
I have even heard, in the President's radio or in his speech yesterday--``We've got the first balanced budget in 29 years. Our economy is prosperous. This budget is purely a simple test of whether or not, after 9 months of doing nothing, we're going to do the right thing about our children's future.''
``We want more money'' is basically what he is saying. I also heard him say we should save the surplus for Social Security. Now he is talking about new investments. In his speech yesterday, he said we need new investments for everything I have mentioned, but he also runs through a whole list of other new spending, social spending, that he is trying to crowd through in the last minute.
I do not have any intentions of succumbing to these demands. I hope my colleagues will not. I just say this, with all respect, how the President could demagog that we cannot have a tax cut because of the Social Security surplus and then in the next minute, propose to spend the so-
called surplus on all these investments is beyond me. I just have no intention whatsoever of going along with that.
I think we should abide by the budget. I do not think we should squander the surplus with new Federal spending. Some of us were interested in tax cuts because we knew that if we did not allow taxpayers to keep their money, that Congress and/or the administration would say, ``Well, let's have more spending.'' There is a real propensity around the place to spend money.
I just hope that our colleagues will resist that temptation. I hope that they will resist these new overtures by the administration that seems to think they should be an equal body with Congress in writing appropriations bills. I think we should have legitimate negotiations but, frankly, that does not make people equal partners.
We have equal branches of Government with divisions of powers. Again, the Constitution says that Congress shall write the laws and Congress shall appropriate the money. We need to get on with our business and do that, send the appropriations bills to the President. If he vetoes them, fine, then let's pass a continuing resolution to keep Government open.
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