Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2022

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for making that point, although I am somewhat sorry because I was going to make the same point. But I am going to make another point.

First of all, let me say to those who may be watching, the gentleman who just spoke from Arkansas is one of my best friends in the Congress. He is a wonderful, wonderful person. He is dead flat wrong, however, in this assertion.

His motion will not give a single cent to the National Guard, not a single cent to the police, not a single cent to anybody.

All it will do is send the bill back to committee. It will delay this bill to do all the other things that it does from being enacted.

It is sad that the Republicans in the Senate haven't passed a single appropriation bill. And, golly day, it took a long time to get them to some agreement on the supplemental, and then, when they agreed on the supplemental, they left the money for the National Guard out.

So, I say to my friend from Arkansas, who is my dear, dear friend and a wonderful person, your amendment, with all due respect, first of all, as you know, is not going to go anywhere. All you will do is return the bill to committee and slow this process down and not give a single cent to the National Guard or policemen, either Capitol Police or any other police. That is the reality.

Now, I wanted to rise and speak on behalf of this bill. I want to thank the chairman, Mr. Ryan, and I want to thank my good friend, who is also another dear friend of mine. Unfortunately, sometimes people think everybody dislikes one another. I happen to like the gentlewoman who is the ranking member, who is, I think, one of our best Members in the House on your side of the aisle.

I know that this is a difficult bill in some cases for your side of the aisle.

I have been here a long time. We just honored Jerry Lewis, who was the gentleman from California who had your position and had the chairman's position. He was back and forth. They came to this House in a bipartisan way to say, let's build this institution into the kind of institution that Americans want.

That is what this bill does. This bill gives us the opportunity to hire, retain, and pay competitively our staff, who are extraordinary people. The American people are getting more than their money's worth with our staff, because they are extraordinarily able people, well- educated people, experienced people, who make a difference for America. This bill seeks to compensate them, not as much as they get in the private sector, but competitively, at least with the executive departments, so the executive departments are not taking all of our people. That is reason enough to be for this bill.

Now, there is something in this bill I don't like, and no other Member probably will come to this floor and say it. Members of the Congress of the United States have not received a cost of living adjustment--forget about a raise--a cost of living adjustment since, I believe, 2009, for 11 or 12 years. And this bill says, oh, we are not going to take one this year either.

Now, let me tell you something. The result of this irresponsible demagogic action--and I don't say any personal aspersions on anybody-- is that only rich people will be able to serve in the House of Representatives.

Now, very frankly, I live alone. My wife died. I am in good shape. I don't need the COLA. It will make no difference in my life. But there are a lot of people who come to this Congress with three or four children, and they have got to open a second residence, either rent or buy here, and keep a residence at home, and they are struggling.

I know it doesn't sound like you are going to struggle at $174,000. I don't blame people who are making $60,000, $80,000 who say: What do you mean you are struggling?

But the fact of the matter is, all I ask is, keep us even. Don't give us a raise. Just keep us even. As the cost of living goes up, just keep us even in terms of our purchasing power.

I am going to vote for this bill, but I sure don't like that provision. Now, we Democrats have put it in; the Republicans have put it in. I get it. I get the politics of it.

But I will tell you, for a long period of time I worked with Trent Lott, with Tom DeLay, with Roy Blunt, and with other Republican leaders--I seem to be the one that has been here consistently working on this--to make sure that at least 50 percent of us on each side voted to give us a COLA, to keep us even, so that we did not expect people who had their housing costs go up, their healthcare costs go up, their educational costs for children go up, to be frozen.

It is tough on families. It is not tough on me, so I am not arguing from a personal standpoint. Very frankly, I am just fine.

But I say this because I want the public to know that there is at least someone who is saying: Look, the job is worth it. You may not think we are worth it, but the job is worth at least keeping even.

But this is a good bill. I am going to vote for it. There are provisions in other bills that I don't like, but I vote for them, because on the whole, I think this is an excellent bill for this institution and for the American people.

I urge everybody to vote ``yes.''

Ms. HERRERA BEUTLER.

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to speak on the motion to recommit that the gentleman from Arkansas offered. I know it sounds like, with the majority, we are just going to have to agree to disagree on this.

I think that there are a lot of good things in this bill that I support. But the biggest challenge for me, having spent this year, like the rest of us, trying to help our families, our constituents move on through COVID, help our small businesses survive, and then starting off this year in the manner that we did and recognizing the impact on not just the Capitol campus, but the men and women who protect us, the Capitol Police, I really feel like in this bill, the Legislative Branch appropriations, there needed to be some significant reforms to some of the failures in response that we experienced.

Now, I know that there are other efforts, not related to this bill, that are looking at other actors, other players. I am setting all of that aside because I don't have control over that. But I do have a say here, with my voting card, on the Legislative Branch appropriations bill.

What is frustrating to me--and I heard, you know, my good friend from Ohio and the Speaker mention: Well, we did this supplemental and put all of this other stuff in here for the Capitol Police. Well, there are things that were left out of that supplemental that are so crucially significant to reforms that will help prevent another January 6, and they are in the motion to recommit.

Let me explain a couple of those. One of those that we have in the Republican motion to recommit is a reform to the Capitol Police Board. We know that there was a major failure and breakdown in communication on the Capitol Police Board, which inhibited the response, the coordinated, collective response of the law enforcement here.

Talk to any police officer who bravely defended us, and they will tell you that they weren't getting clear directives in their headpieces. They will tell you that the coordination effort from the leadership broke down, and they were doing everything they could on the front lines themselves. So a rational response to that would be: Why did that break down and what can we do to fix it?

One of those things is to provide oversight, congressional oversight, over that Capitol Police Board by requiring that board, who made those decisions, who left a lot of our police officers on their own, to meet together in front of congressional committees, the committees of oversight.

As it stands now, we can't get the entire police board together in one room for a hearing. The gentleman and I--on Legislative Branch appropriations--we got to meet with different members of the police board in different hearings at different times. It was helpful. But to really correct the problem--and when you ask each of them: Where was your failing on January 6? They all do this--or they did this. There are now new actors in there.

But I look at the function of that board, and I think, okay, common sense would be to put the Architect of the Capitol, the two Sergeants at Arms, and the Capitol Police chief all on a witness panel in front of the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee or the House Administration Committee or the Senate Rules Committee.

That wasn't in your supplemental, that is not in this Legislative Branch appropriations bill, or in any of President Biden's rescue plans. We do throw a lot of money at it, but we are not fixing a structural, fundamental problem that helped complicate our response.

Our motion to recommit fixes that. It simply changes the language, and it requires them to come before the committees of jurisdiction together and answer questions of oversight capacity from Members of Congress. That is a simple fix. It shouldn't be partisan. It is not in the underlying bill, and it should be. Our motion to recommit does that.

Another thing that we do in our motion to recommit to improve the underlying bill is, we require an improved and streamlined response, and we give that authority to the Capitol Police chief to call in the National Guard on a quick, developing emergency.

One of the things that we heard in the aftermath of January 6 was he said, she said. I called them in, they said they couldn't come. This person said they couldn't come. I mean, we just got very convoluted responses into why the National Guard wasn't here quickly.

Again, I recognize there are other efforts looking into other actors on that front. I am not getting into that. What I am talking about is what we have control over right here.

The underlying Legislative Branch bill does not improve that streamline process. In fact, it leaves in place the process whereby the chief of police has to go through this bureaucratic, arcane process to get permission from every member of that board before they can respond to an immediate emergency and request the National Guard. Well, that was part of the problem on January 6.

Our motion to recommit fixes that. It says that the Capitol Police chief, in an emergency, a quick, developing emergency, can call in the National Guard and have the authority to request them to come. It also has a failsafe in there that says, if the Capitol Police Board gets their act together and meets quickly and sees the issue differently, they can rescind that authority. But what it does, it is an opt-in. Automatically, the police chief has authority to call in the reserves when there is an emergency.

Just like you see where a chief in a major metropolitan area has the authority to call in things, and then they are accountable to the mayor or to the city council, but they have that authority. Right now the Capitol Police chief doesn't have that authority, that was a problem on January 6. Unfortunately, if this bill passes as it is, it will still be a problem today, 7 months later.

Again, there are things in the underlying bill that I like and support, but it is like having the salt for your steak, but you don't actually have the beef. You have got to have that sizzling steak and you add the salt to it and it is a wonderful meal. That is how I look at this.

We do want to put the money forward to make sure that we are adding to the force and we are putting in training programs and that is in this underlying bill. Those are good things. But we have to change the fundamental flaws with how the Capitol Police Board operates.

This is the Legislative Branch appropriations bill. This is the appropriate place. I would have yielded if the House Administration Committee wanted to do that. Had they done it, you wouldn't hear me piping up about it, but they haven't. It needs to be done so that we are taking responsibility for failures here on our campus that we can correct. So I urge adoption of the motion to recommit.

One more thing that I think is really significant, and this is where I differ from the gentleman from Maryland, who I also have great respect for, is the underlying bill talks about pay and making sure that we are adding more police officers to the force. I am there every day of the week and twice on Sunday. The problem is, they are going to hit a cap.

So when a police officer, which we saw in January, February, March, they would work their regular hours, and then because they were short- staffed and there weren't enough officers on the force, they would be called to work overtime. They are accruing that overtime, and at some point, they will have earned too much money to get paid all of it because there is a cap in law that says they can only make so much.

The underlying bill does not fix that cap. However, our motion to recommit does. Our motion to recommit removes that cap so that those officers who are owed that overtime, because they worked their tails off weeks on end, will be able to get that pay and not risk being furloughed as we get to the end of the year.

Again, there are good things in the underlying bill, but it is not quite good enough. We can make it better. We can make it better by adopting the motion to recommit.

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