TRANSPORTATION, TREASURY, HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, THE JUDICIARY, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, AND INDEPENDENT AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2006 -- House of Representatives - June 29, 2005)

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I invite Members to return with me to the thrilling days of the Reverse Houdini. That is what we are seeing today on the floor.

Older Members will remember Harry Houdini who had an act. His act was to have other people tie him in knots and then appear before the public and get out of the knots.

What my Republican colleagues will show you today, as they did in the Labor-HHS bill and other bills, is the Reverse Houdini. Under the Reverse Houdini, you tie yourself in knots. Then you appear before the public and tell them how much you wish you could help them, but you cannot because you are all tied up in knots. You do not mention that you tied the knots.

The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg), in his capacity as chairman of the subcommittee, has done work which I admire and for which I am grateful. He rejected the shortsighted and thoughtless efforts by the administration to gut the CDBG program and to rearrange the section 8 program. And I admire and appreciate what they did. So given the very limited, indeed inadequate, resources with which the gentleman had to work, he did a very good job.

On the other hand, I must say to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Knollenberg) and others on the other side, I admire what you did with inadequate resources, but I do not admire that you are the ones who made the resources inadequate. Members who voted for the tax cuts do not come to the floor with clean hands when they talk about the consequences of the tax cuts.

We will hear today, as we heard on the bill dealing with Labor, Heath and Human Services and Education, laments. The gentleman said he wished he could do more for CDBG. Well, who is stopping him? What is stopping him is the budget he voted for. The budget he voted for was dictated by the tax cuts he voted for.

The President said last night that the war in Iraq will go on and on. He will not waver. No, he will not waver. Funding for all these important programs will waver. A month in the war in Iraq would have been more than enough to make unnecessary all of the apologies we will hear. We will hear the Reverse Houdini again and again and again.

Members of the Committee on Appropriations will come, and they will accurately say that, given the resources they were provided, they cannot adequately fund all of these programs. But we ought to make clear, it is their own decision that led to these inadequate decisions.

In the housing area where I have some involvement and jurisdiction, virtually no program is adequately funded. They did better than the administration would have had them do, and I appreciate that important programs like Youthbuild are going to be resuscitated from having been snuffed out; but we will still have too little in CDBG, the Community Development Block Grant program.

The CDBG is an excellent program, and we are being told, maybe, if we are lucky, we will get it back up to where it has been, in an era of massive tax cuts for the wealthiest and an ongoing war in Iraq. Community development will be going on much better in Mosul and Baghdad than it will be in Pittsburgh and Chicago. I do not mean to deny the needs of people there, but we should not have it come at the expense of people here.

The section 8 program is better, but it will still not be enough. Let us also note that public housing, the entity that houses some of the poorest people in this country, will again not get what it ought to get. I would urge my colleagues, let us stop coming to the floor and apologizing for the consequences of your own actions. Let Harry Houdini rest in peace.