David Obey

Mr. Chairman, every Member of this House supports whatever is necessary to give our troops every dollar and every piece of equipment they need to come through this war successfully and unscathed, we hope; but there are other duties which…

we have just heard a canard. The charge has been made by the Republicans for the last 3 days that there are $19 billion in unspent homeland security funds. Let me tell you how they get to that ridiculous statement. They count all of the…

the Coast Guard has told us very clearly that if we provide this money now, they can get these additional 2,000 people on board by October. They have also told us if we wait until the 2004 budget year that they cannot bring them on until…

I have been around this institution long enough to know what an amendment looks like when it does cut off and end the war because we voted that way to end the Vietnam War. I voted for that resolution, or for that amendment. I also voted to…

Mr. Speaker, this is a sad day for me personally. Thirty-four years ago today, I was sworn in as a new Member of this body. I was inspired by the idea that this institution was supposed to represent. This institution is supposed to be the…

If we are going to be bombing the devil out of a country, I suspect that we have a considerable moral obligation to the population afterwards to help repair the damage and to help repair the human misery. So I do not begrudge what we will…

I do want to object to something I just saw here on the House floor. We have been trying to work out cooperatively, between both sides of the aisle, arrangements on time. The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) was willing to limit his…

in the conduct of foreign affairs, every President deserves the benefit of the doubt. I am standing here today in an empty Chamber because these special orders are simply the time in the House's schedule when after legislative business is…

in a democratic institution, when we have nothing else, the only protections that remain for individual Members and for the constituents that we represent lie in the normal processes of the House. We have just passed a bill in which 90…

I cannot ask people to vote against their bill because it does some things which any piece of legislation would do which came to the floor at this point. It does provide needed funds for Medicare. It does provide funding for a number of…

Mr. Obey moves to recommit the conference report on the joint resolution, H.J. Res. 2, to the committee of conference with instructions to the managers on the part of the House to: (1) disagree to section 323 in Division F of the…

I think everybody here remembers this fellow, President Reagan. He once stood before this body. This is a picture of him doing it. He pointed to an appropriations conference report and he said this: ``This is the conference report, a…

The problem has not been him. The problem has been that while he has tried to keep the process open, we have been denied our fundamental right as a minority to even offer amendments to the products that your committee has produced, and…

Mr. Speaker, this is the eighth continuing resolution to come before this body necessitated by the fact that we are now in the fifth month of the new fiscal year and still do not have a budget. We have not provided the funds that should be…

I think the need for it is self-evident. It is certainly obvious that small rural hospitals are in a tough financial situation and need relief, and it is certainly obvious that if the scheduled reduction in physician payments under…

Mr. Speaker, yesterday this House refused to provide the financial assistance necessary to our local firemen and policemen and other first responders whose responsibility it is to be our first line of defense against terrorist attacks in…

Mr. Speaker, we have been hearing we will do it next time around for a year and a half. Meanwhile, you have gotten zip to the local people who need it the most. We were told a year ago, oh, we will do it down the line. We were told in the…

I will not take the 5 minutes, but let me simply say that this motion simply does two things. It would provide that we will approve $3.5 billion in homeland security grants to first responders, and it will provide the additional $90…

I want to walk through once more what the record is with respect to dealing with this problem. Right after 9-11, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young) and I went down to the White House. He and I and our staff chiefs, when we were locked…

let me simply say the gentleman is correct, we did; and I was immensely proud of the House on both sides of the aisle for cooperating in producing that bill, and I was flabbergasted that that cooperation on the part of the White House did…

I would suggest he call the White House and tell the President to reconsider his veto of the last supplemental that we sent to him where he denied us the ability to get $300 million to those first responders.

Mr. Speaker, after 9-11, it became obvious to all of us, I think on both sides of the aisle, that we needed to equip the people at the local level who will respond to terrorist attacks with the best equipment that we could possibly find to…

let me just point out, the name of our party is not the Democrat Party. It is the Democratic Party. We would appreciate it if we would at least be called by our proper name, okay?

Mr. Speaker, we are not objecting to this process tonight because we are unhappy we are in the minority. We are in the minority, and we expect to lose 99 percent of the votes around here. But we do not expect to have denied to us the…

what the gentleman from Minnesota is asserting is that the minority should not be allowed to offer a legitimate amendment because the majority did not fulfill its responsibilities to abide by certain provisions of the Budget Act and by the…