Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker I rise today to introduce a private relief bill on behalf of Yevgeniya Dobrovolska and Mykola Dobrovolskyy.

Mr. Speaker, in 1999, Alexander Dobrovolskiy brought his wife Yevgeniya and son Mykola to the United States from the Ukraine to pursue the American dream. He worked for Prophet Financial Systems, Inc. and immediately impressed his colleagues as a committed and hard working man. Most importantly, Alexander Dobrovolskiy's greatest source of pride was his family and he demonstrated this pride as a dedicated husband and father.

Tragically, Alexander Dobrovolskiy was killed in a car accident on November 8, 2002. Prior to his death, he had applied for a green card, with his wife and son as beneficiaries of this petition. As a result of his unforeseen death, this application will be automatically terminated and his wife and son will be denied their green cards.

I'm proud to introduce a bill which provides relief for Yevgeniya Dobrovolska and Mykola Dobrovolskyy. My bill readjusts their status to permanent resident status so that Yevegeniya and Mykola will be able to remain in the United States and continue to live out the dream of Alexander.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in supporting this bill which will restore the hopes of Yevgeniya Dobrovolska and Mykola Dobrovolskyy.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor George M. Scalise, who was recently named chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

George Scalise is a highly respected business leader in the high technology and semiconductor industries. As president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, SIA, George has distinguished himself as one of the premiere experts on the issues of international trade, competition, environmental safety and health, as well as workforce issues. In addition to his leadership of SIA, George Scalise serves on President George W. Bush's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and on the boards of Cadence Design Systems and iSuppli Corporation. George previously served on the Boards of SEMATECH, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, and the Bay Area Economic Forum.

George Scalise is dedicated to investing in the education of future science and technology leaders. A graduate of Purdue University, George is on the advisory committees at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, the School of Engineering at the University of Southern California, the Engineering Visiting Committee at Purdue University and a member of the California Council on Science and Technology Fellows Program. He is also actively involved in the University Research Fund.

Mr. Speaker, I'm proud to have George Scalise as a constituent and my friend. He is one of the most effective and respected leaders in our country and our community, with a deep commitment to the betterment of our Nation. I ask the entire House of Representatives to join me in congratulating George M. Scalise on his chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and wish him every success in shaping sound monetary policies for our country.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the amendment offered by my colleagues Chairman Dreier and Representative Lofgren.

The amendment allows the Administration to reform the MTOP standard to control computer exports, a standard implemented during the Cold War to protect high-performance computers from falling into the hands of rogue nations.

Why should this standard be reformed?

Quite simply, the MTOP standard has failed to keep pace with technological innovation and has become a useless tool that serves no other purpose other than to place American companies at a severe competitive disadvantage with their foreign competitors.

Personal computers available today perform at more than 25 times the speed of the supercomputers built just a decade ago. Yet these same PCs are treated like weapons under the MTOP standard.

Clearly, reform of our export system is necessary.

This amendment protects our national security while at the same time allowing American high technology companies to compete on a level playing field with their foreign competitors.

Importantly, it is not only the technology and computer industries who are calling for this reform.

Both the Defense Department and the GAO agree that the MTOPS export control system is ``ineffective'' and ``irrelevant''.

We must reform this standard and I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

Mr. Speaker, this bill isn't about wildfire prevention. Fire prevention is being used as an excuse for allowing massive commercial logging in our national forests.

Although its proponents say otherwise, the bill allows more than just ``thinning'' of small trees and brush that are at risk of burning. It allows logging of the largest, most fire-resistant trees which are found in areas of the forest that are the least likely to burn.

Timber companies want special access to these commercial-grade trees and the isolated sections of forest where they flourish. Under the pretext of ``fire prevention,'' this bill rewards the industry with that access.

When this proposal was unveiled by the White House last summer, James Connaughton, the Chairman of President Bush's Council on Environmental Quality, gave the only frank description of the plan to come from the Administration. He said:

``[T]he best place to get commercial grade timber is in the

context of these thinning projects. So why not go there? And

that's really what this [initiative] is about.''

So the ``thinning'' is simply a Trojan horse to allow massive commercial logging in our forests.

If we're serious about stopping the destructive fires that destroy homes and threaten lives, we need to focus on the borders between forests and populated areas. Clearcutting in isolated areas of our forests, as the bill allows, will not protect lives or property. The slash created by clearcutting undermines forest health and increases the risk of damaging wildfires.

The Miller Substitute focuses on where the greatest threat exists . . . the border between forests and population centers. At the same time, it preserves our ecologically valuable old growth forests. If wildfire prevention is the goal, then the Miller Substitute is the best way to get there. We need to defeat this bill and adopt the Miller substitute.

Ms. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 766 and I thank the Chairman of the Science Committee Mr. Boehlert and my Silicon Valley colleagues Reps. Honda and Lofgren for their work in bringing this important bill to the floor of the House.

Recent history indicates that the investments in research and development made by the federal government have benefited our nation considerably. The federal government provided seed money for the research that led to the development of the Internet, the web browser, and cracking the genetic code, these investments have spawned a decade of economic prosperity and promise, increased productivity, and hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

In fact the federal government has served as a venture capitalist by making investments in nascent technologies that have generated companies who maintain our national technological and scientific predominance.

This legislation builds on that tradition by authorizing over $2.3 billion dollars in federal funding for nanotechnology, the science of creating and manipulating objects at molecular levels.

In Silicon Valley nanotechnology is already being used to develop new types of semiconductors, medical devices, and sensors that detect environmental and other types of hazards.

Progress in this field has been hampered by a lack of trained scientists which is why this bill and the investment we make today is absolutely essential. This funding will help to produce the next generation of great American scientists.

The NSF has estimated that the market in products that carry nanocomponents could reach $1 trillion by the next decade.

The seed money we provide today will go a long way to ensuring that the nanotechnology market, which is poised to be the next big thing in the technology industry, will also be the next big AMERICAN thing.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor Mark Simon, who for ten years has educated, amused, irritated, informed and instructed the readers of the San Francisco Chronicle with his well-written, well-read column.

``From beaches to redwoods,'' Mark Simon loves the region of which he writes. Over the years, the people, politics and problems of our region have all become grist for his Chronicle column. He has regaled us with tales of John Madden's taste for tamales and kept us up to date on the unfolding of the Century Loan scandals. He has raised awareness and informed his readers on issues as diverse as campaign finance reform, gunshot locators, Devils Slide, and breast cancer treatment for low income women in our community. Mark has reported on every side of Stanford, from sports to the opening of the Cantor Art Museum. His columns have traced the dynamic changes in our community: Silicon Valley's ups and downs, the birth and death of a San Francisco Bay Olympic bid, and the constant rising and falling of housing prices. He has filled the narrative of our region with a variety of colorful events and characters, spotlighting the Tour de Peninsula, former monks, great achievers such as LaDoris Cordell, and even his own beloved sons. We know them all now and we're grateful to Mark as a son of the Peninsula, for his unswerving love of it.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Mark Simon for his service to our community as the Chronicle's chronicler of life on the San Francisco Peninsula and the magnificent 14th Congressional District. No one has done it better or with as much knowledge, guts, intelligence or love of our area.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor William R. Brody, M.D., Ph.D., who has

earned the J.E. Wallace Sterling Lifetime Achievement Award and will be presented with it by the Stanford Medical Alumni Association and its Board of Governors on May 2, 2003.

Dr. Brody is a native of Stockton, California, who earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT and his M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Following post-graduate training in cardiovascular surgery and radiology at Stanford, the National Institutes of Health and the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Brody was professor of radiology and electrical engineering at Stanford. He's been a cofounder of three medical device companies, is responsible for over 100 publications and one U.S. patent in the field of medical imaging. He has made contributions in the fields of medical acoustics, computed tomography, digital radiography and magnetic resonance imaging.

Dr. Brody, who became the 13th president of the Johns Hopkins University on September 1, 1996, has extensive ties to the 14th Congressional District which I'm proud to represent. He and his family lived in Palo Alto for many years and his children attended several years of school in our community. In addition to his extraordinary accomplishments in the fields of engineering, medicine and education, Dr. Brody is a talented musician, a great athlete, a loving husband, a proud father, and an exceptional friend to many.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Dr. William R. Brody for his lifetime of service to others and for his extraordinary contributions to medicine. He has made our country stronger and better, and for this we salute and honor him.

Mr. Chairman, it's with great disappointment that I rise today in opposition to H.R. 1350, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act reauthorization.

H.R. 1350 fails special ed kids for these reasons: It undermines their civil rights and their educational opportunity by removing parental involvement in actions relating to the identification, evaluation and education of their child.

It limits the dialogue between school professionals and families. It institutes a one-year statute of limitations on parents to bring about any grievances with their child's education.

It eliminates short term objectives for a student's Individualized Education Program and limits a teacher of special ed to participate in the process.

It makes changes to disciplinary procedures which allow disabled children to be punished or removed for behavior due to their disability.

And H.R. 1350 fails to fully fund IDEA. It calls for full funding over seven years, but there isn't any guarantee that these dollars will be there in seven years.

Congress made a commitment in 1975 to our children and our school districts to fully fund special education at forty-percent. What an insult it is that twenty-eight years later, Congress is still funding less than half of this commitment. The budget passed by the House this year authorizes only $8.5 billion, far short of the $20.2 billion needed to fulfill our obligation.

Today every state across the nation is struggling fiscally, the worst condition of states since the Great Depression and school funding is being slashed.

It's critical that our nation's Governors unite with Congress now to uphold the special education commitment to school districts. I support the Woolsey-McKeon amendment which requires that any additional increases in IDEA federal funding be passed down directly to the local level.

I regret that the House is missing a critical opportunity to invest in our children and our schools through IDEA reauthorization. The reality of this bill is that it's bad for our children and it will set back the progress we've made.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the distinguished ranking member for his leadership and acknowledge the leadership of the committee chairman and everybody else involved in this bill. But I rise today in strong opposition to it, and let me state why.

I think we should recognize that this bill neither advances energy independence nor any kind of national security. Instead of becoming less dependent on foreign sources of oil and energy for our national security, this bill is a repeat of the past. What the bill does not improve is the efficiency of automobiles and trucks. Instead, it calls for the sixth government report on motor vehicle efficiency in 10 years.

As a Californian, I have to say that this is the biggest shortfall and loss of opportunity to address what the energy companies did to the State of California. They manipulated, they cheated, they lied, and they ripped Californians off: small businesses, large businesses, consumers, residential homeowners. This is what happened to California. This is no longer speculation. In this bill, there is not one sentence, there is not one phrase that says Californians deserve a refund.

I tried with my colleagues to accomplish this. Thirty-two California Democrats signed on to that amendment and said that if it were offered on this floor today, we would support it. Unfortunately, not one Republican stands to say for their constituents that we deserve a refund. The chairman of the FERC said that the amendment was helpful. I have tried and tried and tried. This is a failure of this Congress to stand up and to do something about this; and I think it is an outrage, because I think it is one of the biggest heists in the history of this country.

So I oppose the bill. It does not provide national security, it does not provide energy independence, and it certainly does not make the wrongs right.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the distinguished gentleman for his leadership on this issue of many, many years.

I have some prepared remarks, but since I do not have that much time, I am going to summarize. The people that are tuned in to this, that are listening to C-SPAN today, we have on the floor a national energy policy. What some of us are trying to do is to put the legislative vehicle into drive, to go forward into the future, instead of insisting on keeping the vehicle in reverse. What is at stake are fuel-efficiency standards for how much gasoline we use in this country.

If in fact we want to become less dependent on foreign oil, clean up our air, embrace the technologies that are already there on the shelf, then this amendment would absolutely slide through the House.

But regardless of who is here in a handful of years, this policy, I predict, will become the policy of our land, because America is always about the future and the best ideas, and not the past.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a distinguished Californian, Donna Rutherford, as she is inducted into the San Mateo County Women's Hall of Fame.

Donna Rutherford was one of thirteen children who learned early in life the values of work, sharing and helping others. A mother of three, she became active in her children's schools as a parent volunteer, working to improve education for all children. This led to her being elected a Trustee of the Ravenswood City School District, a position she held for 12 years. In 2000, she became a member of the City Council of the City of East Palo Alto and she currently serves as the City's Vice Mayor.

Donna Rutherford worked in the food services industry for many years and became a part-time cook at Mateo Lodge's Wally's Place. She was promoted two years later to Social Rehab Coordinator and now serves as Wally's Place's Program Administrator where she supervises counseling staff and the care and management of the facility.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Donna Rutherford as she is inducted into the San Mateo County Women's Hall of Fame.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a distinguished Californian, Vicki Smothers, as she is inducted into the San Mateo County Women's Hall of Fame.

As Vice President of Free at Last's Board of Directors, Vicki Smothers has devoted herself to treating substance abuse and its tragic effects on the people of our community. She has been with this highly effective, grassroots organization which specializes in community recovery and rehabilitation from its inception. She was also one of the cofounders of the East Palo Alto AIDS Task Force.

Vicki Smothers is Community Programs Specialist for Prenatal Advantage where she coordinates prenatal services and counsels teen mothers in an effort to reduce infant mortality rates. A long-time East Palo Alto resident, she has a keen awareness of the needs of the community and is devoted to assisting others.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Vicki Smothers as she is inducted into the San Mateo County Women's Hall of Fame.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a distinguished Californian, Mildred Swann, as she is inducted into the San Mateo County Women's Hall of Fame.

Mildred Swann organized a neighborhood forum where people of different ethnic heritages gathered to share their experiences and aspirations. She engaged many volunteers in the effort that resulted in the formation of a tutoring and mentoring program for Tongan Youth. She serves as the Facilities Chair of Community Gatepath, and in this position she led the campaign to decrease dependence on shrinking government funding while maintaining the quality of the organization's programs. She also heiped Community Gatepath to work with San Mateo County to identity high-risk MediCal families and provide them with prenatal care and parenting skills.

Mildred Swann has served her community in many ways and with many organizations, and has been honored by Menlo College for her contributions to the community. She was also recognized by Foothill College Haramba for her service to youth.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Mildred Swann as she is inducted into the San Mateo County Women's Hall of Fame.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a distinguished Californian, Ruth-e Bennison, as she is inducted into the San Mateo County Women's Hall of Fame.

Ruth-e Bennison received a Masters degree in accounting from the University of Washington and worked as an accountant until her marriage in 1956. She later opened her own travel agency, began to travel extensively herself and became the Western Regional Manager for Sheraton Hotels. When her mother became ill and entered a nursing home, she developed a keen interest in long-term care facilities. She became a volunteer in the long-term care ombudsman program in San Mateo County and she has selflessly dedicated more than 15,000 hours to the program over 15 years. Ruth-e Bennison has also given generously of her time and talents as a HICAP volunteer and has given 5,200 volunteer hours to this agency, She's been honored for her work by the Department of Health and Human Services and was honored with the HICAP Excellence Award in 2002 for saving San Mateo County more than $5 million in Medicare related expenses.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring Ruth-e Bennison as she is inducted into the San Mateo County Women's Hall of Fame.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my very distinguished colleague, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton), who, as he brings his distinguished service to this House, also is the distinguished father of a son who is serving tonight as we have this debate.

Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight in support of this resolution; not because I like every single word that is in it, but the words that mean the most to me this evening are those that relate to and are connected to the treasures of our Nation, the sons and the daughters that are in harm's way this evening.

They are the sons, they are the daughters; they are fathers, they are mothers; they are grandsons, they are granddaughters; they are nephews, they are nieces; and they are really the beloved of our Nation.

I have raised questions about what would bring us to war. I stand in opposition to preemption, but tonight I do not believe is the night for that debate. We had it before; I think we will have it again.

Our troops who wear the flag on their uniform may very well, some of them, come home with a flag draped around their coffin. So, tonight I think our entire Nation genuflects and prays for every single one of them.

Let God watch over them and bring them home safely to the families who gave birth to them, to the families that love them, and to the families that had to bid farewell to them.

God bless them, and God help us.