Senate Floor Speech
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison
October 9, 2004 -- Page: S10908

MRS. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, my amendment simply keeps what the Senate has said it wants, and that is an intelligence subcommittee on Appropriations, and it keeps the 13 subcommittees of Appropriations. It says the Appropriations Committee will organize into 13 subcommittees with the intelligence subcommittee as soon as possible after the convening of the 109th Congress.

All my amendment does is keep the Appropriations subcommittees at the same number, making sure there is one intelligence subcommittee, but it does not require the merging of Defense and Military Construction.

It may be that when the Appropriations Committee looks at all of the options for the making of 13 subcommittees, that that will happen, but I think the Appropriations Committee should be the one that makes the recommendations to the Senate. We do not have to rush to make this decision for the Appropriations Committee.

According to the CRS, eliminating a subcommittee through a measure on the Senate floor is unprecedented. In more than 200 years, the CRS says, the Senate has never eliminated a subcommittee through floor action without the committee bringing it to the floor. The Senate has created subcommittees, as with the Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations in 1952, but not eliminated subcommittees. Merging subcommittees to create room for the new one may be the right thing to do, but the floor is the wrong place to do it.

What is proposed today will set a precedent that could impact every committee by pulling the ability of the committee to organize itself and having that agreed to by the Senate. This is a precedent that should concern every committee. It should concern the majority and the minority. There is no reason to make this decision now.

Also, these changes must be made in conjunction with the House. The House Appropriations subcommittees and the Senate Appropriations subcommittees should match so that when we conference, we will have a finite subcommittee that deals with the same issues; otherwise, there could be many problems with the appropriations process that would complicate an already complicated process.

The House has not made any decisions about reorganizing itself on the Appropriations Committee. The wise thing for the Senate to do would be to create the new intelligence subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, determine that there will be 13 subcommittees but require the Appropriations Committee to do the reorganization, after which the Senate would be asked to agree. That is all my amendment does.