The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE OMNIBUS APPROPRIATIONS ACT” mentioning the Department of Interior was published in the Senate section on pages S1642-S1643 on March 7, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE OMNIBUS APPROPRIATIONS ACT
Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I hope that my distinguished friend from Missouri and my friend from Montana will attend my remarks for just a moment, and perhaps comment on them, just as they have on one another's with respect to the bill that they have been so eloquently attempting to move to passage.
Just a few moments ago, the distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Hatfield, appeared on the floor with the extraordinary news that the administration had expressed its unwavering intention to veto the omnibus appropriations bill that was reported by the Senate Appropriations Committee just yesterday.
The Senator from Oregon pointed out that appropriations, the spending authorization for the spending of money, is the prerogative of Congress. That is perhaps the most fundamental of all the prerogatives of Congress, that no President of the United States has ever been able to or can now or will be able to in the future force the Congress to pass an appropriation at a level that the President wishes.
But my distinguished chairman and friend from Oregon, I do not think, reached the true depths of the arrogance of this veto threat. So while he was speaking, I got out our publication, our committee report, on the subject. I discovered that the total amount of money that we proposed to allow the President of the United States to spend during the current fiscal year in that bill, for five different agencies, is
$164 billion, approximately $164 billion, approximately $164 billion, of which a little less than $5 billion is restricted and cannot be spent unless the President reaches an agreement with Congress on a balanced budget at some time in the future.
The President of the United States has said that he will veto this bill unless we allow him to spend $166 billion instead of $164 billion without any restrictions, without any commitment on his part, without any agreement with the Congress with respect to a balanced budget in the future.
I must say that I find this to be absolutely extraordinary and without precedent, that a President of the United States should, once again, threaten to close down five major units of our Government because we propose to allow him to spend $164 billion and he wants to spend $166 billion.
I know that each of my colleagues here on the floor is a chairman of a subcommittee on the Appropriations Committee, as am I. The Senator from Missouri and I are chairmen of subcommittees whose bills are a part of this overall bill. But I just wonder whether they agree with me or not that it is practically beyond belief that a President of the United States should threaten this whole range of programs in all of our areas on which we are willing to spend $164 billion just as he is willing to commit himself at some point or another to a balanced budget, and the great bulk of that, $159 billion anyway, whether he agrees or not, just because we will not spend $2 billion more than he wants.
Mr. BURNS. If the Senator from Washington will yield.
Mr. GORTON. I will yield.
Mr. BURNS. I do not know where he wants to spend the $2 billion. He was not specific about that, I ask?
Mr. GORTON. I believe he was specific about it. Perhaps a few hundred million were in the field of the Senator from Missouri. Others were in social and health services.
My own responsibility for the Department of Interior and related agencies, where we are willing to spend $12.5 billion, is maybe $200 million more than he wants to spend over and above $12.5 billion; in other words, 1 or 2 percent more money than we are authorizing for him, and yet he threatens to veto this entire bill because he cannot spend every dime that he wishes to spend.
Mr. BURNS. I congratulate the Senator from Washington, because I know we had to look at Indian schools, we had to look at the Indian Health Service. Those areas suffered cuts last year, and we tried to add some money back and were successful in doing that, and we get this close.
I am wondering, though, if we are not sort of lapping over into the political world rather than the world of reality or this world of trying to finance the Government and make it work.
Mr. GORTON. It seems to me that is the most apt comment on the subject.
Mr. BOND. Mr. President, if the Senator from Washington will yield.
Mr. GORTON. He will.
Mr. BOND. The thing that is striking to me is that we have been working on these bills for many months. I have been working on the title which funds veterans, housing, environment, Federal emergency management, and as I think my distinguished colleague knows, we have been trying to find out from the administration what they want.
I remember when our son was 2 or 3 years old, he would come in and say he wants more. From a 2- or 3-year-old maybe more is a reasonable request, but when you get it from a Budget Director who is supposedly supporting a President who now recognizes the need for a balanced budget, when the President and the Budget Director refuse to give you any specifics, it, to me, is amazing that they can get by with doing nothing but issuing veto threats.
I ask the Senator, maybe he has heard, because I have not heard, from the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, of any changes that they wish to see so that they can utilize the funds better?
It is a great gimmick. It is a great political campaign to say, ``I am going to spend more on everything. Of course, I'm for a balanced budget. Of course, I'm for a balanced budget, but I want to spend more on everything.''
Do they tell you where they want to make any cuts, I ask the Senator? Did they tell you where they want to save money?
Mr. GORTON. For almost a year, this Senator has suggested that within the frame of reference of the amount of money available to use for the Department of the Interior and related agencies, if the administration wanted to shift priorities, then we would be happy, seriously, to consider those shifts. None have been proposed.
Mr. BOND. You have not heard from them either. I thought I was the only one who was completely stiffed by them. In November, I put in requests. I asked the Agency heads, the Department heads whose budgets we fund, ``If there is an adult in supervisory authority, please have them contact us and say what changes they want to make.''
I had a conversation with the Vice President. I said, ``This is a process in which the executive and the legislative branches need to sit down and compromise.''
Every government I have ever served in, and I served at the State level where I was a Republican chief executive with a Democratically controlled legislature, we always sat down and worked together, and the people expected us to do that.
How can the people of the United States expect us to negotiate a budget or appropriations bills when one side will not even talk to us and all they do is send veto threats? I ask my colleague, how do you compromise? How do you work with, how do you negotiate with somebody who will not talk with you?
Mr. GORTON. Well, you do not. I must say, I found particularly striking the analogy of the Senator from Missouri to a 2- or 3-year-old child who simply says, ``More.''
In this case, what we have is an administration that only says,
``More. We want more spending, we do not want any setoffs, but we want to send the bill to somebody else, to our children and our grandchildren. We really do not want a serious proposal that will lead us to a balanced budget, except maybe after the end of the next Presidential term. We will think about binding someone in the future, but we don't want to bind ourselves.''
So we have now in front of us the proposition that $164 billion is not enough money to spend, and the President will veto a bill that only spends $164 billion, of which $5 billion is fenced, as it were. ``We've got to have $166 billion to spend the way we want without any conditions imposed on that spending.''
Again, I think the Senator from Oregon was too polite to say so, but I believe that if that is the proposition with which we are faced, it is pointless to spend a week or so of this body's time debating the details of a proposal which will be vetoed in any event.
Regrettably, we will perhaps have to approach the President with another of these notorious continuing resolutions; that is to say, short-term appropriations bills, which--and I think I can speak for my colleagues on this side of the aisle--when I say they will be for smaller amounts of money, they will be markedly smaller amounts of money in authorizations for the administration than is the bill that was arrived at working with both Republicans and Democrats in an attempt to reach a common ground somewhere between the last set of appropriations proposed by this body and those originally asked for by the President.
It is too bad, but here we are with a veto threat over the proposition that we are not going to spend $166 billion in exactly the way the President wishes but only $164 billion, with $5 billion of it contingent upon the President agreeing to a balanced budget at some reasonable future time.
Mr. SIMPSON addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming is recognized.
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