Energizing American Shipbuilding Act

Mr. Speaker, I thank you very much for the opportunity to address the House.

As I often do in these evenings in the Special Order hour, I try to first lay out what it is: what is the purpose, what is the goal, and what is the value in what we are trying to accomplish.

I find myself always harkening back to a quote that I saw many years ago, and then more recently found etched into the marble at the FDR Memorial here in Washington, D.C. It comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he talked about what he was trying to accomplish and what he thought America ought to accomplish during the Great Depression. His words are equally important during the Great Recession and the years thereafter.

He said: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

It is kind of what we are all about as Democrats, and that is why we found the tax cut, the Republican tax cut which no Democrat voted for last December, so profoundly troubling. That tax cut, on top of the 2001 and the 2003 Republican tax cuts, added $2 trillion to the wealth of the top 1 percent of Americans.

Let me say that once again. FDR was quite clear in his test of policy. He said: ``The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.''

The 2001 and the 2003 Republican tax cuts, together with the December 2017 Republican tax cuts, which no Democrat in the House of Representatives voted for, added $2 trillion to the wealth of the top 1 percent of Americans.

I suppose that would be okay if the 99 percent had somehow seen their wealth grow. It didn't happen. In fact, what we have seen in the last decade since the Great Recession is that the great middle class of America and the poor have seen no real income growth.

In the last couple of years, yes, there has been a wage increase, about 2 percent, totally consumed by inflation, which was slightly more than 2 percent--no real income growth.

So what is happening here is that we Democrats are proposing a better deal for Americans. Yes, those words are similar to what FDR used. But we are proposing a better deal for Americans, not one that makes the rich richer, although that would be fine if the rest of America could also become richer.

But that is going to take a change in public policy, and that is what we are proposing to do, because our public policy going forward is going to be about a better deal for the American people.

We are proposing, as we go into this election year, that we push aside the Republican proposal, which is essentially a better deal for the superrich, and we want to bring about a better deal for the people.

Here are the three major elements of that deal:

We want to lower our healthcare costs and prescription drugs for the American people. We can do this. Unfortunately, our colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle are going in exactly the other direction. As they have ripped the guts out of the Affordable Care Act, we have seen the cost of healthcare in America skyrocket.

We have seen the cost of drugs skyrocket. We want to end that. One of the things we most definitely want to end is what the Republicans are now proposing and that is that we go back in America to the bad old days when, if you had a preexisting condition, you could not get healthcare; or, you would have to pay a small fortune just to get an insurance policy.

No, we don't want that, but that is what our Republican colleagues are trying to give us all across this Nation--a return to the insurance discrimination where, if you have a preexisting condition, you cannot get healthcare at an affordable price and quite probably couldn't get it at all.

Issue one, the cost of drugs. The 2003 improvement to Medicare part D provided prescription drugs at a reduced cost for seniors. All good. A clause was written into that which prohibited the

Federal Government from negotiating drug prices for the tens of millions of Americans on Medicare.

So we have seen the cost of prescription drugs soar. We have seen the stories about a drug that was acquired by some rip-off person who then took the cost of that drug from a few dollars per pill to several hundred or several thousand dollars per pill.

So that is point one. I am going to go down to point three, because I am going to spend time on point two.

What we want to do is clean up the corruption of politics in Washington and across this Nation. Just recently, the Treasury Department said that the NRA didn't have to reveal who its contributors were to its dark money program. Similarly, no other dark money PAC across the State had to reveal who their contributors were.

Citizens United opened the floodgates to hidden money, secret money. Millions upon millions of dollars pour into campaigns to influence the effect of those campaigns. So we want to deal with Citizens United. We want to deal with this problem of corruption in our political system. There are many ways we can do it, but until we can deal with it, we are going to continue to see more and more legislation that benefits the rich at the expense of the working men and women of America.

Now, let me go to this second one here. We want to increase and grow our economy and jobs through an infrastructure program rebuilding America. That will be the central focus of what I want to spend this evening on.

So, as we talk a better deal for the American people, we will be talking about healthcare issues, we will be talking about corruption and ending the dark money. We will also talk about rebuilding the infrastructure for America and creating jobs.

As we go into this, why is it important? Why is infrastructure important?

I suspect many of you remember just more than a year ago that the greatest waterfall in all the world was created at the Oroville Dam in California, just a few miles upstream from my district on the Feather River. Yes, an infrastructure failure. The Oroville Dam spillway was about to give way, just to the side of this, creating a 30-foot wall of water, because the main spillway had collapsed.

I suppose if you are interested in waterfalls, this was quite an event. But it was dangerous. Two hundred thousand of my constituents had to immediately evacuate in the cities of Marysville, Yuba City, and Live Oak, and other small communities in that area, for fear that that infrastructure project would fail. Well, it did, but not totally.

For the folks in Seattle, Washington, or anybody who was traveling on Interstate 5 from Washington State to British Columbia, it turned out it was a tough day to get there. This is the Interstate 5 bridge. Well, I suppose if you had pontoons or maybe water wings, you could stay on Interstate 5.

This is just one example of the tens of thousands of bridges across America that are considered to be unsafe and structurally unsound. This one proved it.

A similar bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the Twin Cities area, resulted in deaths as that bridge collapsed.

Infrastructure. American infrastructure, according to Duke University and the study they published a couple of years ago, ranks in the Ds. I do think we have one C. This is going to require glasses to try to find the one C in our infrastructure system.

Our ports are a C-plus. The rail systems, the private rail systems are a B. The rest of them are Ds and Fs. Roads, bridges, dams, on and on, sanitation systems, water systems.

All of us have heard about the problem in Michigan with the water system there. Well, it is repeated in California up and down the Central Valley of California with water systems that are contaminated in multiple ways, as they are in Michigan.

So, what are we going to do about it?

Well, we have the good fortune of an opportunity presented to us by Democratic leaders. Let me start with a couple of examples of what can be done if we were to Make It In America.

Take, for example, an American success story of Make It In America. The Tappan Zee Bridge in New York, they did it right. They did it with U.S.-manufactured steel. It was a $3.9 billion project and 7,728 American jobs created.

Out in California, we do things a little differently and not always better. You have heard of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Well, they decided that the Chinese steel would be cheaper. It turned out it wasn't, and there were thousands of American jobs that didn't happen. It was $3.9 billion over budget, as that Chinese steel was used. There were 3,000 jobs created in China, and the most modern steel mill in the world to produce steel that was badly welded and flawed in many ways.

So, we have a choice: We can make it in America, as New York did with the Tappan Zee Bridge, or you can have it made in China, as California did with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, not our proudest moment.

For you who are not aware, I am a Californian. I was the Lieutenant Governor when this disaster was going on. I screamed and yelled and jumped up and down and said, What in the world are you doing? Oh, but it is cheaper. It is supposed to be by 10 percent. Cheap is not always better--an example of what could be done if we were to make it in America.

Now, this idea of Make It In America actually started with Steny Hoyer, our minority whip. I am going to put up a couple of things. He has renewed his program that he and I worked on beginning in 2010.

Over the years we have talked about Make It In America. We have talked about various ways it can be done, policies and the like. This Monday, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer re-energized Make It In America. I think it is Make It In America 4.0.

So we have encouraged entrepreneurship by assuring access to workplace benefits like healthcare and retirement security, and providing more and stronger boosts to businesses with ideas and successful businesses.

I just came across one of these earlier today. I was talking to a friend out in California, Phil Wyatt, a Ph.D. guy who worked out of the University of California, Santa Barbara for some time. He came across a way of using a machine to analyze what is in something--a chemical analysis, an analysis of biological components, and the like. He started a company called Wyatt Technology.

It is an analytical machine that is used all around the world. It is used in healthcare. It is used in biology. It is used in chemical analysis and the like. The company is an American company, an entrepreneurship that was developed in this country. There are 88 straight quarters of profitability, and no way in hell is he going to allow the Chinese to steal it from him, even though his equipment is broadly used throughout the world. A great success story, Wyatt Technology.

So, where did it come from?

Well, it was an entrepreneurial program. We need more entrepreneurs. We need more entrepreneurs who are out there developing new businesses like Phil did several years back. They can do it. They are going to need support from their government. They need sound tax policy. They need the education and research that is going on in our universities.

They need to be able to accept the risk of starting a new business, whether it is a high-tech business or maybe it is somebody that wants to go out and work at a taco stand. But they ought to be able to have their healthcare and they ought to have their retirement security available to them as they go through that time.

So, that is one of the things that Mr. Hoyer has talked about as he renews the Make It In America plan. We are going to hold infrastructure for a few moments and pick up the third element in his plan, which is education, which ties directly to what I talked about with Mr. Wyatt.

Wyatt's business, almost more than a decade old, actually came out of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was a professor and he was doing research. And so it is the educational system, not only at the high level, but also all the way down the line, promoting pathways for career opportunities.

A lot of this is something you might find in the career technical education field, where a man or woman learns to be a welder and then says, Well, I can start my own welding shop. I can become my own boss. So they do.

Or, maybe it is somebody that has learned hairstyling or cosmetics and decides they want to open their own shop. If they are able to have portable healthcare, if they have their retirement benefits, they can run the risk of starting their own business.

The training programs and education and the research all fit into this focus on education. So Mr. Hoyer has outlined that as the second element.

The third element in the renewal of the Make It In America plan that he and I worked on in the beginning of 2010, and continued working on these many years, is a focus on infrastructure.

As I said earlier, as I talked about the failure of our basic infrastructure systems--water, sanitation, bridges, highways, reservoirs and dams--is this problem, also this opportunity. As I said, with this report coming out of Duke University, where they rated the infrastructure systems--as did the Society of Civil Engineers--it is a fact that if we are building our infrastructure system, for every dollar we invest in the infrastructure, we will be able to create 21,671 jobs. And for every billion dollars we invest, we will create those jobs. For every dollar we invest, we will improve the economy by $3.54.

So the return on that $1 investment is 3.5 to 1, so it makes a lot of sense to do that. Besides that, the bridges won't fall down and the dams won't crumble.

This one is extremely important: repairing and rebuilding our aging infrastructure. It also gives us the opportunity to innovate in the infrastructure of the future.

Well, as Mr. Hoyer wants to talk about the infrastructure of the future, I want to talk about, for my remaining time here, the infrastructure of the past.

You may be aware that America is now a nation that exports a strategic national asset. It is our petroleum products. For fracking and other reasons, we are now an export nation when it comes to crude oil, gasoline, diesel, and, above all, natural gas. We have succeeded in turning this around from an importing nation to an exporting nation.

Some of these statistics lead me to an opportunity that we could rebuild, reenergize, a critical national infrastructure.

We don't often think about our maritime industry as being infrastructure, but it really is. It supports, to be sure. And we often talk about ports. We talk about intermodal, from the ship to the port, to the trail, to the train and rail, and then on to the highways. All true, but we often ignore the ship itself.

So here we are. The future of American shipbuilding actually resides in the export of oil and natural gas. By 2020, the U.S. is expected to be the world's third largest exporter of LNG, liquified natural gas.

Mr. Speaker, 225 LNG vessels are expected to be added to the world fleet by 2020. Those are big ships. There is a little picture there of one.

Due to the eroded capacity of American shipyards, not one--none, nada, none--of those 225 LNG ships, vessels, will be built in American shipyards unless there is a law that requires that just a small part of that export of LNG be on American-built ships.

Similarly, oil, I don't have that up here, but none of the oil that will be exported from the United States will be on American-built ships unless there is a law.

So, are you surprised that we are proposing a law called the Energizing American Shipbuilding? It is a piece of legislation that I have introduced to deal with a critical infrastructure, the ships that America once had.

So, of 225 new LNG vessels, currently 70 percent of those orders are going to Korea and the rest to China, maybe a few to Japan, and none to the United States.

So, the legislation called Energizing American Shipbuilding Act, introduced by myself, H.R. 5893, was introduced a few weeks ago. It requires that a certain percentage of the liquified natural gas and crude oil exports be transported on United States-built ships and American-flag vessels, crewed by American mariners, from the captains to the engineers to the seamen, American men and women on these American-built vessels.

A similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Senator Wicker, and that bill also does exactly the same thing. Senator Casey, Mr. Hunter, Mr. Courtney, and Mr. Wittman--two Democrats, two Republicans-- introduced the legislation. In the Senate, one Republican and one Democrat have introduced the very same legislation, bipartisan, bicameral, and, by God, we ought to do it.

What happens if we were to do it? Well, let's look at some of the very simple opportunities that exist.

Instead of China and Korea and Japan building the ships for the export of this strategic national asset, let's do it in America. Let's make them in America.

The Energizing American Shipbuilding Act, introduced in the House and the Senate this year, if we were to pass this legislation, we are talking at least 50 new ships built in America. Let's see. That is 3, 6, 9, 12--about 15 of them, LNG ships, would be built here in the United States. And when they are commissioned and they are on the oceans, they would have American mariners on board providing a strategic advantage to our American defense policy. I will talk about that a little later.

There would be many, many more on the crude oil side, perhaps more than 30. Probably closer to 35 ships would be built in the next decade and a half to two decades, providing, oh, I don't know, maybe more than 1,500 jobs for American mariners.

And we haven't yet been able to calculate all the jobs in the shipyards of America, but we know that, for San Diego, at the shipyards in San Diego, they would be building these ships. We know that they would be building these ships in the shipyards of the Gulf Coast and in the shipyards on the East Coast, particularly in Philadelphia. These jobs would be spread around at the shipyards on the West Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the East Coast.

And, just as important, the bill would require that the engines, the hydraulic systems, the pumps, the pipes, the electronics, that those, too, also be built in America.

We are talking about a major opportunity to make it in America, to make it in America once again so that America can continue to be a major place for the construction of American-built ships, whether those are naval ships, as they are today, required to be built in the United States, or whether they are commercial ships requiring that a small percentage of the export of oil and natural gas be on American-built ships with American sailors. Bottom line: manufacturing matters.

So, when Mr. Hoyer, our minority whip, talks about renewing the Make It In America agenda and he talks about the necessity for that to be focusing on infrastructure, we put forward that a critical piece of that infrastructure is the American maritime industry--just as important as the trucks that travel our highways, another piece of infrastructure; just as important as the trains that travel the rails, another critical piece of infrastructure; just as important as the barges that move up and down the Mississippi River system on the Ohio, the Missouri, or the Mississippi itself. All of that is infrastructure, as are the airports and the airlines.

We ought to start and always think about the fact that we are a maritime nation and that in our infrastructure we consider the American maritime, we consider the ships and the men and the women who are on those ships.

Now, this is a national security issue. TRANSCOM, responsible for moving American military supplies around the world, has stated categorically that, unless we revive our American maritime industry, unless we have sailors and captains and engineers on ships who are able to transport our military wherever they need to go around the world, we are going to be in a world of hurt.

Earlier today, I was talking to one of the officers of Liberty Maritime, one of the American shipping companies, owners of ships that will soon be transporting a brigade of Reserve men and women from the United States to Europe as part of our European defense issues.

So it becomes important that we deal with the infrastructure of the United States and that we do so keeping in mind that these are American jobs that fulfill this important policy position. This is the value that, as we go about our legislative work here, we keep in

mind that the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide for those who have too little.

Among those who have too little are the working men and women of America. And if we carry out this infrastructure challenge, if we make it in America, if the steel is American made, if the locomotives are American made--and there is a marvelous example of what can be done with public policy that says, if we are going to build locomotives for the Amtrak system on the Northeast corridor from Washington, D.C., to Boston, that those locomotives will be American made, with 100 percent American-made equipment.

Interestingly, when this was part of the American Recovery Act back in 2010, a bill put forward by Democrats and President Obama, there was a requirement for $700 million or $800 million to be spent on American- built locomotives, 100 percent American made. A German company said: Whoa, $700 million? $800 million? Locomotives? American made? We could do that.

So, in Sacramento, California, Siemens, one of the great manufacturing companies in the world, said: Well, let's see. We make not locomotives, but we do make cars for the transit systems. We can do locomotives.

And they did. Just this last week, I got off one of the Amtrak trains from New York City, walked past a gleaming locomotive, brand-new, and on the side it said ``Siemens.'' I am going: That locomotive was made in Sacramento, California, just outside my district, by a German company with American workers, American steel, American wheels, American engines--made in America.

How did it happen? Because Congress, with Democrats in control and a Democratic President, said: We are not going to talk about making America great again; we are going to actually pass a law that says this money will be spent on American-made locomotives.

And so it was. And now that plant is continuing to expand as they produce cars for transit systems all across this Nation.

FDR had it right, and we are going to follow. We are going to make sure that the laws of this Nation actually provide for the working men and women; for those who don't have a job, an educational program, job training programs, career development programs in community colleges and high schools, apprenticeship programs, so that the men and women of America can participate in the revitalization of the American infrastructure system.

Whether that is a highway, an interstate freeway, an airport, a dock, or a port, we are going to make sure that the American workers have a chance not only in building the infrastructure, but in using the steel and the concrete and the other elements that go into these infrastructure projects. Those should also be made in America so that that infrastructure program flows way beyond just those who are pouring the concrete to those who are making the cement and making the manufacturing plant that will develop the cement.

This is where we are. And by the way, we want to make sure that tax policy does not do what the Republicans have repeatedly done--2001, 2003 tax cuts and again in the 2017 tax cuts that have transferred $2 trillion of American wealth to the top 1 percent. That is shameful, but that has actually happened. And all the while the rest of Americans have seen virtually no improvement in their economic situation.

Tax policy--critically important. Policy that requires that when we spend your tax dollar, that your tax dollar is spent on American jobs in American factories, putting Americans to work in what we call a ``Make It In America'' agenda.

And so keep this in mind, Mr. Trump, this is how you make America great again, by making it in America. So we can work with our Republican colleagues, as we are with our shipbuilding program, the Energizing American Shipbuilding Act. Democrats and Republicans understand, together, that it is public policy. It is the laws that we write that set the pace for economic growth and spread that growth out across the great American population so that everyone--everyone can participate in the rebuilding of America's infrastructure, whether it is a ship at sea, a port that is being developed, an airport, a highway or a railway, water system, sanitation system, we must write into all of those laws that when American taxpayer money is used, it is spent on American manufacturing and American workers.

So we will make it in America, and America will make it when we follow these kinds of wise public policies, keeping in mind that our task is to make sure that we always focus not on those who have much, but, rather, on those that have too little.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.