Manhattan Project National Historical Park Act

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

To my friend, Mr. Hastings, the technology which created the bomb cannot be separated from the horror which the bomb created. The celebration of the technology of the bomb bespeaks a moral blindness to its effects, which include not only the devastation of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the $10 trillion Cold War between the U.S. and Russia and the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons which today hang over the world like so many swords of Damocles.

At a time when we should be organizing the world towards abolishing nuclear weapons before they abolish us, we are instead indulging in admiration at our cleverness as a species. The bomb is about graveyards; it's not about national parks.

The philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote:

The major advances in civilization are processes that all

but wreck the societies in which they occur.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I shall continue then.

When you walk into the Bradbury Science Museum at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, you're greeted on your immediate left by replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy, the two bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The space surrounding them does not include a picture of the leveled Japanese cities, pictures of children with massive birth defects, or stories of families and hundreds of years of history obliterated in the blink of an eye. It does not include a discussion of the health effects of worldwide distribution of radiation from the bombs or from the larger proliferation of nuclear technology that emanated from Los Alamos.

I am speaking about the Bradbury Science Museum. The bombs reside in a section of the museum called Defense, which presents information on the nuclear arsenal, the nuclear stockpile, plutonium, and explosives. Other sections discuss how nuclear energy works and how the bomb was triggered, how the bomb was triggered.

A substantive discussion of the myriad negative impacts of the technology that came out of the Manhattan Project is relegated to obscurity. A public forum tucked away in a corner provides space for public input.

When the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, more than 200,000 people were killed instantly. In the years that followed, over 100,000 additional people died of radiation poisoning. The Japanese people today continue to experience the devastating and long-term effects of the bomb.

It is now widely acknowledged by many top U.S. Government officials at the time of the war that dropping the bomb on Japan was completely unnecessary. I want to get into that section at this moment so that those who say, well, we need to create a memorial to the bomb because it ended the war, well, that's not true. I'm going to give you some quotes, Mr. Speaker.

This is from Dwight David Eisenhower, who was general of the armies and also, later on, President of the United States. He said:

In July 1945, Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my

headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was

preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those

who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to

question the wisdom of such an act. The Secretary, upon

giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico

and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction,

apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been

conscious of a feeling of depression, and so I voiced to him

my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that

Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was

completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that

our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of

a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory

as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that

Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender

with a minimum loss of ``face.'' The Secretary was deeply

perturbed by my attitude.

That's Dwight Eisenhower in a book called ``Mandate for Change,'' page 360.

From General Douglas MacArthur.

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur:

MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic

bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from

what the general public supposed.

Cousins continues:

When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop

the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been

consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He

replied that he saw no military justification for the

dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier,

he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did

anyway, to the retention of the institution of the Emperor.

That's from a book called ``The Pathology of Power,'' Norman Cousins.

Leo Szilard was the first scientist to conceive of how an atomic bomb might be made. That was in 1933. He speaks of a meeting with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head scientist of the Manhattan Project:

Szilard: I told Oppenheimer that I thought it would be a

very serious mistake to use the bomb against the cities of

Japan. Oppenheimer didn't share my views. Well, said

Oppenheimer, don't you think that if we tell the Russians

what we intend to do and then use the bomb in Japan, the

Russians will understand it? They'll understand it only too

well, Szilard replied.

Brigadier General Carter Clarke, who was the military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables:

We didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do

it, and they knew that we didn't need to do it, we used them

as an experiment for two atomic bombs.

This is quoted in Gar Alperovitz, ``The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.'' Alperovitz, by the way, who did 30 years of research on the subject, said:

I think it can be proven that the bomb not only was

unnecessary, but known in advance not to be necessary.

Another quote. Henry H. Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces:

The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first

atomic bomb fell because the Japanese had lost control of

their own air.

Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet:

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The

atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military

point of view in the defeat of Japan.

The use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no

material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese

were already defeated and ready to surrender.

This is Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to President Truman:

Certainly, prior to 31 December 1945, and in all

probability, prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have

surrendered even if atomic bombs had not been dropped.

That's from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.

This is from Major General Curtis LeMay:

The war would have been over in 2 weeks without the

Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic

bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

Now it's just not disputable that this technology was not necessary. So let's go back to the creation of a national park and the naming of the park after the Manhattan Project.

May I ask how much time I have?

Thank you.

We have to now ask ourselves, since it can be widely disputed--and by top military officials--that the dropping of the bomb was not necessary, then why are we honoring this technology with a national park? It's really a legitimate question.

When the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, again, 200,000 people were killed. And to have this discussion in the context of honoring a technology that created a bomb, I think, really raises questions about where we are with this country and where we are with the bomb. The splitting of the atom and the use of the split atom to create an atomic bomb actually bespeaks a split consciousness in this country. It was, in a sense, an intensification of dichotomized thinking, of us versus them, whoever they are. We then decided that all of our problems in humanity could be solved by technology, that the bomb then was put in place of reason, that the bomb was put in place of diplomacy, that the bomb was put in place of talking with each other and settling our differences. No, the bomb then became the metaphor for how technology rules over humanity. We're captives of our own machines.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I remember as a young person going to elementary school and that children would have to do drills called duck-and-cover because we believed that the United States was going to be targeted by nuclear weapons launched by the Soviet Union. The fear drove an entire generation's dreams. The fear caused the United States to spend trillions of dollars on a Cold War that took away from the needs of the people. The fear resides in the world today when there are some who urge an attack on Iran. Why? Because they are said to be developing a nuclear weapon.

Where does this stop? We cannot honor this technology. We cannot celebrate ingenuity that was used to put all of humanity at risk. We have to begin to reassess who we are as human beings and ask ourselves whether or not we have essentially reached the limits of our ability to develop technology which we can control.

And it's not only about nuclear weapons. When you learn that the globe itself is experiencing tremendous upset because of the human activity, when you learn that science can now create genetically modified organisms that can change the nature of food. As a matter of fact, life itself can be changed through cloning. We act as these mini gods who can endlessly tinker with our planet and life itself and then name parks after it. No.

In the scheme of things, someone will say, Dennis, this is just a park. What are you getting so excited about? This is about naming a new national park after the Manhattan Project. And we have to just stop and reflect on where this takes us. There should be a discussion about the full legacy of the Manhattan Project, including its devastating effects upon the Japanese people and upon the rest of the world.

If there was going to be a new park, it should serve as a solemn monument to Japanese American friendship that rose from the ashes and the worldwide work for nuclear disarmament that continues to this day, rather than a celebration of a technology that has brought such destruction to the world. Failure to recognize this dimension, even in its first iteration, really is a significant injustice.

I looked at the CRS report on this, and there's no mention of how this is going to be framed or phrased. The museum at Los Alamos is a celebration of the triumph of technology over humanity. It's a powerful illustration that we're developing technology at a rate that far exceeds our ability to manage it. Now we are faced with the choice to memorialize this point of view into a national park.

I would ask how much time I have left.

In the last 4\1/2\ minutes I want to read a poem by Henry Reed. He juxtaposes in this poem Japan before the dropping of the bomb and the technical aspects of the bomb itself.

It's called ``The Naming of Parts'':

Today we have the naming of parts. Yesterday, we had daily

cleaning. And tomorrow morning, we shall have what to do

after firing. But today, today we have the naming of parts.

Japonica glistens like coral in all of the neighboring

gardens, and today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this is the upper sling

swivel, whose use you will see when you are given your

slings. And this is the piling swivel, which in your case you

have not got. The branches hold in the gardens their silent,

eloquent gestures, which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released with an

easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me see anyone

using his finger. You can do it quite easily if you have any

strength in your thumb. The blossoms are fragile and

motionless, never letting anyone see any of them using their

finger.

And this, you can see, is the bolt. The purpose of this is

to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it rapidly

backwards and forwards: we call this easing the spring. And

rapidly backwards and forwards. The early bees are assaulting

and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the spring.

We're naming a park today. Yesterday we had the naming of parts, and not just Japan but our humanity was obliterated. Do we get a chance to reclaim it?

I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Chairman, I seek to claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman and my colleagues, I oppose this amendment. It would make a terrible bill even worse.

Our Nation's environmental laws are founded on cooperative federalism. This is how it works:

The Federal Government sets minimum standards to assure that every American has a basic level of protection so no one is forced to breathe dirty air or drink dirty water. Then the States decide how to meet those standards, or set stronger standards if they choose. The States also implement the programs they adopt. Finally, if a State fails to act, EPA can step in and do the job itself.

This approach has worked well for over 40 years. It means that there is a healthy give-and-take between the States and the Environmental Protection Agency. The States receive Federal funds, and they run their own programs. But EPA has the tools to encourage the States to do more, where necessary.

Before Congress adopted the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972, both signed by President Nixon, it was up to the States to control pollution. The problem was that many of them didn't do it. We had rivers catch on fire, smog so thick you couldn't see nearby mountains, and a tremendous toll on public health and lives.

It wasn't that States didn't want to clean up pollution, but if there are no minimum standards, States are forced into a race to the bottom. If a State wants to reduce pollution from oil refineries, the oil industry can threaten to build its new refineries in another State with looser requirements. The result is that States were afraid to require industry to clean up to the levels needed to protect the public.

This amendment, like other provisions already in the bill, overthrows the principles of cooperative federalism that have guided us for 40 years. Instead, it would leave various pollution control decisions almost entirely up to the States.

The proponents of this amendment claim that it is about EPA's Regional Haze Program. Every Member should understand that this amendment is not limited to regional haze.

The first part of the amendment is remarkably broad. It applies to all of the criteria air pollutants regulated by the States--smog, NOX, fine particulates--and it applies in every area that is not meeting the health-based air quality standards.

This amendment says that even when a State fails to act, fails to control air pollution, EPA can no longer provide a backstop. EPA must wait at least 2 years before they can fill in for the States' failures. And there's no deadline for EPA ever to act, allowing unhealthy air quality to persist indefinitely. Citizens of that State would no longer have any recourse.

The second part of this amendment effectively eliminates minimum national criteria to protect air quality in our national parks.

The Clean Air Act has special provisions to protect air quality in the pristine lands that the Nation has set aside for all Americans to enjoy--our national parks, national monuments, and wilderness areas. After all, we go to the Grand Canyon to see the view. There's little point in protecting these lands if we allow their air and water to be polluted.

This amendment targets those Clean Air Act provisions. It says that when it comes to protecting the air quality of the national parks that belong to all Americans, the State where a park is located has sole discretion to decide how much, if any, pollution control would be required. EPA would no longer be able to require a minimum level of pollution reductions, and if the State failed to act entirely, as some have done, EPA would no longer be able to step in and set pollution controls.

The practical effect of this amendment would be to allow some of the oldest and dirtiest power plants in the country to continue polluting without standard pollution controls. I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I urge Members to oppose this amendment and yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

This amendment is narrower than many of the provisions in this bill.

Instead of providing a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card for many polluters, like most of the provisions in this bill, this amendment provides a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card for one polluter--the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona. The amendment prohibits EPA from requiring pollution controls if it would adversely impact employment at the Navajo Generating Station or at other coal plants or coal mines on tribal lands in northern Arizona.

Now, if you listened to the debate on the last amendment, you might have thought this is another dispute about whether EPA or the States should set the standards; but Arizona has no authority to control air pollution on tribal lands, and the tribe has not established its own program to set the standards. That means, by barring EPA from requiring pollution controls, this amendment would have the effect of ensuring modern pollution controls are not installed on this plant.

And that's a problem.

The Navajo Generating Station is a huge power plant--over 2,000 megawatts. It's also old. The Navajo Generating Station began operating almost 40 years ago, and it was built without standard pollution controls. And it's dirty. This plant spews almost 20,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, or NOX, each year. This is a dangerous air pollutant. NOX forms small particles that penetrate deep into the lungs, causing emphysema, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases, heart attacks, and premature deaths.

The Navajo Generating Station is the fifth highest emitter of NOX pollution in the United States, and this plant harms the air quality at 11 national parks and wilderness areas. These are some of our Nation's most treasured and popular national parks. Almost 12 million Americans visit these parks each year. They travel there because it's part of our natural heritage of the Nation and because it belongs to all of us--but not if this amendment passes.

This amendment says that polluters' interests in continuing to pollute trumps Americans' interests in having clean air in their national parks. This amendment would remove EPA's authority to protect clean air in the national parks, so I urge my colleagues to stand up for clean air and to oppose this amendment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, the EPA is not going to shut down the power plant; but if this amendment passes, they can do nothing to get some reductions in pollution and work with the power plant to accomplish that goal.

I now yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Lujan).

Mr. Chairman, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from New Mexico.

Mr. Chairman, this is an amendment that would do more harm than good, and I urge my colleagues to oppose it.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5987) to establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and to include extraneous material on the bill under consideration.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 5987 is a bipartisan bill authored by me that will establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Mr. Speaker, there is a like bill, a bipartisan bill, also pending in the Senate.

The park will encompass three locations that were integral to the tremendous engineering and human achievements of the Manhattan Project. The three locations are the Hanford site in my home State of Washington, Los Alamos in New Mexico, and Oak Ridge in Tennessee.

The vast majority of the facilities that are eligible to be included in this park are already owned by the Federal Government, and they are located on lands owned and controlled by the Department of Energy.

Our Nation already possesses these pieces of history, and the real purpose of this bill is to officially declare the importance of preserving the history, providing access to the public, and include the unique abilities of the Park Service to help tell this story.

Currently, some of these facilities slated for inclusion in this park are scheduled to be destroyed at considerable taxpayer expense. A great many local community leaders in all three States and interested citizens have worked to coordinate a commitment to preserving this piece of our history. Additionally, the government will save millions of dollars from foregone destruction, as opposed to the minimal cost of providing public access and park administration.

In recognition of the important contributions to the Manhattan Project by the men and women at sites across the country, the bill contains a provision allowing communities like Dayton, Ohio, for example, outside the historical park, to receive technical assistance and support from the Department of the Interior as they seek to preserve and manage their own Manhattan Project park resources.

This is a good piece of legislation, and it is part of our history, Mr. Speaker. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I advise my friend from Ohio I have no more requests for time, and I am prepared to yield back if he is prepared to yield back.

I am prepared to close, Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield back his time.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is really not as complicated as my good friend from Ohio tries to make it appear to be.

Now, I recognize, and we've had conversations on this when the bill was introduced, and I respect his opinion, but I respectfully disagree with his opinion and his arguments. There is nothing wrong with that. After all, we're Americans, and we can do that in America.

But I want to, and with the gentleman, what I heard him saying was dealing in what if and what would be an ideal world. Well, we'd all like to have an ideal world. But let's talk about reality at that time.

We were forced into the Second World War. Germany, of course, had started, some can say, started that war with their blitzkrieg on September 1, 1939, into Poland. You could say it may have started when Japan started expanding where they were going in the Pacific, and certainly when they attacked us on December 7, 1941.

Whether we liked it or not, we were in a war for survival. There is no question about that. That is simply the facts.

In the process of carrying out that war, and by the way, Mr. Speaker, let me say that war is absolutely unpredictable, but because if you're logically thinking about war, if it were predictable, it wouldn't have happened in the first place. But the very nature of war is unpredictable.

So we didn't know where we were, but we had heard that Nazi Germany was developing an atomic weapon. Now, they had been building a military machine long before because we were caught a bit off guard in the Second World War. We were not a warring Nation. So we had to use whatever technology we had in order to defend our freedoms. One way that was decided was to build an atomic weapon if we had to use that atomic weapon.

What this bill purports to do is nothing more than to talk about the ingenuity of the American people to develop this weapon when the nuclear industry was relatively in its infancy, and did it in such a short time frame. That is something that we ought to put into our history books because we do put past battles in our history books.

Just earlier this week was the 150th anniversary of Antietam, right up the road here in Sharpsburg, Maryland--the largest single-day casualty in American history at that time. Yet we memorialize the battlefield because it helped preserve our Union and get our Union back together.

So I think it's right that we look at these from that perspective.

Now, I can only imagine how difficult a decision it was for President Truman shortly after President Roosevelt had died to make this decision; but he made it because in his judgment, given the information he had, it would probably save more lives than it would cost by dropping a bomb. That was the judgment he made.

Let me speak just a little bit about, again, the ingenuity and the technology of what happened, and I can only speak about my area, Hanford, and about, specifically, about the B Reactor.

This is the first nuclear reactor that was built in this country; and from start to finish, it was built in less than a year. The technology at that point wasn't even proven. Yet when they started the B Reactor and went ``hot,'' as they said, it obviously did what it was supposed to do. It was a tremendous scientific achievement.

To open this up to the public and open this up to school children to see what we can do and what we did in this country to protect the freedoms and liberty we have, I think is worth preserving.

Again, all this does is take those three main sites that largely are already owned by the government, transfer them to the National Park Service, and show them to the public so we can learn and remember what happened during that time.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, let me say that I've been down on this floor many times criticizing the Obama administration. But the Obama administration, through Secretary Salazar and the Department of the Interior, is in favor of legislation establishing precisely what this bill and the Senate bill hope to do.

So while I have differences with them, I certainly congratulate them for recognizing how important this legislation is.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I urge adoption of the legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim time in opposition to Mr. McKinley's amendment.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment would take away the EPA's authority under the Clean Water Act to retroactively deny permits to fill streams and wetlands in order to protect drinking water supplies, recreational waters, and fish and wildlife habitat. Now EPA has used this authority to veto permits after they were issued responsibly only three times in 40 years. All of these were extremely rare cases and these vetoes were necessary to protect critical water resources.

In 1981, EPA revoked a permit for a solid waste landfill because it was leaking toxics into Biscayne Bay. In 1989, after objecting to a permit before it was issued, it overturned a permit to destroy 1,200 acres of flood plain wetlands in Georgia. And in 2010, which Mr. McKinley mentions, EPA denied a permit for one of the largest mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia that would have buried more than six miles of West Virginia streams and polluted downstream waters with mining waste, causing permanent damage to ecosystems and streams. The veto was not a surprise--and I stress that. EPA consistently expressed its concerns about water quality impacts of this mine beginning from 2002 to 2006, when the Corps issued the permit.

Let me stress this was an extremely rare action taken by EPA. And the first time it was used, it used the Clean Water Act to overturn an approved mining permit. The surface mining in the steep slopes of Appalachia has disrupted the biological integrity of an area about the size of Delaware, buried approximately 2,000 miles of streams with mining waste, and contaminated downstream areas with toxic elements. People have been drinking the byproducts of coal waste from mountaintop removal for more than two decades. Rather than clean and clear water running out of their faucets, the people of Appalachia are left with orange or black liquid instead.

This is not just about the environment, Mr. Speaker; it's about public health. The health problems caused by exposure to these chemicals and heavy metals include cancer, organ failure, and learning disabilities. Not only that, but there are multiple cases of children suffering from asthma, headaches, nausea, and other symptoms likely due to toxic contamination from coal dust. This is an environmental justice issue. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle will claim EPA is killing jobs. I disagree with Mr. McKinley. What the EPA is doing is protecting the people of Appalachia from exposure to toxic chemicals that are harming them.

Now to put this in perspective, each year the Army Corps of Engineers processes about 60,000 permits to fill waters and grants 97 percent of them. Over 40 years, the EPA has vetoed only three of these permits retroactively. On the very rare occasion one of these permits threatens to permanently destroy our Nation's critical water resources, the EPA should have the authority to stop it. This is authority that the EPA has used very rarely, and there is no evidence that the EPA has abused this authority.

This amendment is completely unnecessary. I urge Members to oppose it and to protect EPA's authority to safeguard our waters and our drinking water sources.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I want to point out that, in addition to this being a terrible amendment, it's also an amendment that's going nowhere. And it really frustrates me that on the last day of the session before the election, this do-nothing Congress continues to bring up bills that are going nowhere--and they know are going nowhere.

For 2 years, the House Republicans have picked millionaires over Medicare and the middle class. Now they plan to leave town today without entering into law any responsible deficit reduction, any middle class tax cuts, the American Jobs Act. They have no jobs bill. The farm bill they have neglected. The Violence Against Women Act. These are all urgent priorities that we should be working on right now rather than trying to pass amendments or bills that are going nowhere.

The American people can't afford a do-nothing Republican Congress that refuses to act on issues critical to middle class families, to small businesses, to farmers, and to women. I urge the Republican leadership to just stay in town and complete our work. Don't waste our time on bills like this that are going nowhere. The Senate is never going to take this up.

Now here are a few of the things that the do-nothing Republican Congress has found time to do:

Voted to end Medicare as we know it and increase costs on seniors by $6,400.

Republicans chose millionaires over the middle class, giving more tax breaks to the wealthiest.

Republicans vote for corporations that ship jobs overseas over passing the American Jobs Act.

Republicans voted to restrict women's access to health services.

It is amazing to me that we sit here hour after hour on the last day because they refuse to continue to work and talk about bills going nowhere, when all these other major priorities need to be addressed.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I'm very much aware that the EPA's veto was challenged by the mining company, and the EPA has appealed this ruling. I'm hoping that the Court of Appeals will see the light and understand that the EPA should be able to protect the health of the people of Appalachia.

Again, this amendment is completely unnecessary, and it's part of a process where this Republican House does absolutely nothing but waste our time. We shouldn't be leaving today. We should be staying and doing our work.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Well, today, the do-nothing Congress will slink out of town. It's going to be the earliest adjournment in an election year since 1960; but, you know, I guess the Nation has no problems and there's no work undone, so it's just time to go home and campaign. It's pretty extraordinary. We've enacted one-quarter the number of bills into law of Harry Truman's do-nothing Congress, 1947-48. So I guess this is the ``do-nothing-er'' Congress.

So here we are again today. We are going to consider today--the only work today will be four bills that have previously passed the House. Someone hasn't read their civics textbooks. If you pass a bill and send it to the Senate, it's there; they'll consider it or they won't consider it. If you pass it again and send it again, it doesn't make any difference. In fact, it's somewhat repetitive and wasteful of everybody's time when we could be doing postal reform to ensure the future of the post office. We could be doing a farm bill; there are a lot of people suffering a horrible drought. We could be dealing with the sequestration, which there's concern on both sides of the aisle on that. But we're not. We're considering four bills previously passed and one new one.

Well, I have a reasonable amendment to an unreasonable bill, which is now before us, which is the one new bill before us. My amendment would ask that within 6 months--that's not very long--the Department of Transportation and the EPA submit a report to Congress on fugitive coal dust. Now, it seems a couple of extraordinary letters have been sent out saying, my God, this will stop projects and exports that are going forward--undue delay. I'm not aware of anything that would be delayed by this. It says a study will be done; it doesn't delay any ongoing applications or projects at all. But what it would do is potentially avert a tremendous amount of litigation down the road. If we find that fugitive coal dust is not a problem--which the coal industry says--then that would relieve a lot

of people in gateway ports and large cities in the West where coal dust is being proposed to transit through those cities, including cities in my district.

People are very concerned about this. They want to know, is it a problem. How far from the loading point does fugitive coal dust get emitted from the car? Are there ways to deal with the fugitive coal dust? Does the surfactant work? Is that a solution? Should the cars be covered? Is that a solution? What are the problems? What are the problems at its destination in terms of whether or not there would be coal dust at the port destinations? If the coal is stored outside, how is it transported onto the ship? Et cetera, et cetera. So if we had these answers, we could talk about the safe and clean transport and allay a lot of concerns that are ultimately going to lead to a lot of litigation unless we know.

Now, the industry says, oh, it's been studied. Well, no, it hasn't. In fact, one railroad has pursued action against the coal industry because fugitive coal dust has caused safety problems on the railroad. It gets into the ballast; it blocks the ballast from draining. The ballast destabilizes, the tracks destabilize, and trains can derail. Now, that seems to me like a problem that should be dealt with. And there may be some very, very simple ways to deal with it. Some say surfactants; some say covered cars. There are other potential solutions out there. Wouldn't it be good to know? Wouldn't it be good to know? That's all I'm saying. A 6-month study and a report to Congress won't delay anything at all. It just would give us some knowledge. And I would hope that we legislate around here with a little bit of knowledge and not just off the cuff.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Does that mean there's only one speaker on their side?

May I inquire of the Chair how much time I have remaining.

Again, we will hear apocryphal denouncements from the other side of the aisle--this will cost millions of jobs and billions of dollars and stymie our exports. No, it's a study. It's a study that would take 6 months. It's a study that, if it agrees with the industry's conclusions, would assure the American public that there won't be problems with these trains transiting through their hometowns.

It's something we should know. It's something the government should look at. Apparently, there are some propriety studies that we aren't allowed to see that say there's no problem. Well, if that's true, then the railroads and the industry should let the American public see those propriety studies. Really, not too many people are willing to take someone at their word when it comes to an issue of public health.

So it's a very simple amendment. It won't delay anything; it will take 6 months. It will cost very little, and it will give us the information and knowledge we need to figure out how to safely transport coal.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.